Verifying the Consistency of the Digitized Indo-European Sound Law System Generating the Data of the 120 Most Archaic Languages from Proto-Indo-European
Jouna Olavi Pyysalo, Aleksi Sahala, Mans Hulden · Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications · 2018
Using state-of-the-art finite-state technology (FST) we automatically generate data of the some 120 most archaic Indo-European (IE) languages from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) by means of digitized sound laws. The accuracy rate of the automatic generation of the data exceeds 99%, which also applies in the generation of new data that were not observed when the rules representing the sound laws were originally compiled. After testing and verifying the consistency of the sound law system with regard to the IE data and the PIE reconstruction, we report the following results: a) The consistency of the digitized sound law system generating the data of the 120 most archaic Indo-European languages from Proto-Indo-European is verifiable. b) The primary objective of Indo-European linguistics, a reconstruction theory of PIE in essence equivalent to the IE data (except for a limited set of open research problems), has been provably achieved. The results are fully explicit, repeatable, and verifiable.