A complexity measure for diachronic Chinese phonology

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic Finite State Automaton. The Minimum Message Length principle is then employed to find the complexity of this structure. The idea is that this measure is representative of the amount of dissimilarity between the two languages.