Phonetic Reconstruction of the Consonant System of Middle Chinese via Mixed Integer Optimization
This work addresses a specific challenge in historical linguistics by providing a computational method for phonetic reconstruction, which is incremental in applying optimization techniques to a known domain.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing the Middle Chinese consonant system by formulating it as a Mixed Integer Programming problem, achieving effective and robust results as demonstrated through numerical evaluation on synthetic and real data, including application to Guangyun and 20 modern dialects.
This paper is concerned with phonetic reconstruction of the consonant system of Middle Chinese. We propose to cast the problem as a Mixed Integer Programming problem, which is able to automatically explore homophonic information from ancient rhyme dictionaries and phonetic information from modern Chinese dialects, the descendants of Middle Chinese. Numerical evaluation on a wide range of synthetic and real data demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of the new method. We apply the method to information from Guangyun and 20 modern Chinese dialects to obtain a new phonetic reconstruction result. A linguistically-motivated discussion of this result is also provided.