Toward a deep dialectological representation of Indo-Aryan

摘要

This paper presents a new approach to disentangling inter-dialectal and intra-dialectal relationships within one such group, the Indo-Aryan subgroup of Indo-European. I draw upon admixture models and deep generative models to tease apart historic language contact and language-specific behavior in the overall patterns of sound change displayed by Indo-Aryan languages. I show that a 'deep' model of Indo-Aryan dialectology sheds some light on questions regarding inter-relationships among the Indo-Aryan languages, and performs better than a 'shallow' model in terms of certain qualities of the posterior distribution (e.g., entropy of posterior distributions), and outline future pathways for model development.