Phonetic Reconstruction of the Consonant System of Middle Chinese via Mixed Integer Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel mixed integer optimization approach for reconstructing Middle Chinese consonant sounds by leveraging ancient rhyme data and modern dialects, yielding a robust and effective phonetic reconstruction.

Contribution

It presents a new computational method using Mixed Integer Programming to automatically analyze phonetic data for historical Chinese linguistics.

Findings

Effective reconstruction of Middle Chinese consonants

Robustness demonstrated on synthetic and real data

New phonetic insights from Guangyun and dialects

Abstract

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.