2009/04/08 by Choudhury, Monojit, Mukherjee, Animesh, Basu, Anupam +3
#Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0904.1289
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a single parameter for this model that is meant to introduce a small amount of randomness in the otherwise preferential attachment based growth process. The experiments with this model parameter indicates that the choice of consonants among the languages within a family are far more preferential than it is across the families. The implications of this result are twofold -- (a) there is an innate preference of the speakers towards acquiring certain linguistic structures over others and (b) shared ancestry propels the stronger preferential connection between the languages within a family than across them. Furthermore, our observations indicate that this parameter might bear a correlation with the period of existence of the language families under investigation.