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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 10:1 (2020) ► pp.42–86

A probabilistic assessment of the Indo-Aryan Inner–Outer Hypothesis

| University of Zurich

This paper uses a novel data-driven probabilistic approach to address the century-old Inner-Outer hypothesis of Indo-Aryan. I develop a Bayesian hierarchical mixed-membership model to assess the validity of this hypothesis using a large data set of automatically extracted sound changes operating between Old Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan speech varieties. I employ different prior distributions in order to model sound change, one of which, the Logistic Normal distribution, has not received much attention in linguistics outside of Natural Language Processing, despite its many attractive features. I find evidence for cohesive dialect groups that have made their imprint on contemporary Indo-Aryan languages, and find that when a Logistic Normal prior is used, the distribution of dialect components across languages is largely compatible with a core-periphery pattern similar to that proposed under the Inner-Outer hypothesis.

Keywords: quantitative linguistics, Bayesian modeling, historical linguistics, language contact, Indo-Aryan, sound change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Indo-Aryan dialectal variation
      • 2.1.1Pre-Old Indo Aryan period
      • 2.1.2Old Indo Aryan period
      • 2.1.3Middle Indo Aryan period
      • 2.1.4New Indo Aryan period
    • 2.2Proposed Indo-Aryan dialectal groupings
  • 3.Rationale
    • 3.1Bayesian models in linguistics and related fields
    • 3.2Operationalizing the Inner-Outer Hypothesis
  • 4.Data
  • 5.Modeling sound change
    • 5.1Prior distributions over sound change probabilities
  • 6.Generative model
  • 7.Implementation and inference
  • 8.Results
    • 8.1Sparsity of language-group distributions
    • 8.2Language-group distributions
    • 8.3Sound change distributions
    • 8.4Posterior predictive checks
      • 8.4.1Entropy
      • 8.4.2Accuracy
  • 9.Discussion and outlook
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix (supplementary material)
    • Appendix (supplementary material)
      • Dirichlet model sound change probabilities
      • Logistic normal model sound change probabilities
      • Accuracy scores for sound change distributions for simulated data
  • References
Published online: 25 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.18038.cat
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