Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 10:1 (2020) ► pp.42–86

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

A probabilistic assessment of the Indo-Aryan Inner–Outer Hypothesis

 | University of Zurich
Published online: 25 May 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.18038.cat
Abstract
This paper uses a novel data-driven probabilistic approach to address the century-old Inner-Outer hypothesis of Indo-Aryan. I develop a Bayesian hierarchical mixed-membership model to assess the validity of this hypothesis using a large data set of automatically extracted sound changes operating between Old Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan speech varieties. I employ different prior distributions in order to model sound change, one of which, the Logistic Normal distribution, has not received much attention in linguistics outside of Natural Language Processing, despite its many attractive features. I find evidence for cohesive dialect groups that have made their imprint on contemporary Indo-Aryan languages, and find that when a Logistic Normal prior is used, the distribution of dialect components across languages is largely compatible with a core-periphery pattern similar to that proposed under the Inner-Outer hypothesis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Indo-Aryan dialectal variation
      • 2.1.1Pre-Old Indo Aryan period
      • 2.1.2Old Indo Aryan period
      • 2.1.3Middle Indo Aryan period
      • 2.1.4New Indo Aryan period
    • 2.2Proposed Indo-Aryan dialectal groupings
  • 3.Rationale
    • 3.1Bayesian models in linguistics and related fields
    • 3.2Operationalizing the Inner-Outer Hypothesis
  • 4.Data
  • 5.Modeling sound change
    • 5.1Prior distributions over sound change probabilities
  • 6.Generative model
  • 7.Implementation and inference
  • 8.Results
    • 8.1Sparsity of language-group distributions
    • 8.2Language-group distributions
    • 8.3Sound change distributions
    • 8.4Posterior predictive checks
      • 8.4.1Entropy
      • 8.4.2Accuracy
  • 9.Discussion and outlook
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix (supplementary material)
    • Appendix (supplementary material)
      • Dirichlet model sound change probabilities
      • Logistic normal model sound change probabilities
      • Accuracy scores for sound change distributions for simulated data
  • References
References (91)
References
Aitchison, John. 1986. The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data. London & New York: Chapman & Hall. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berger, Hermann. 1955. Zwei Probleme der mittelindischen Lautlehre. Munich: J. Kitzinger.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blei, David M., Alp Kucukelbir & Jon D. McAuliffe. 2017. Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians. Journal of the American Statistical Association 112:518.859–877. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blei, David M. & John D. Lafferty. 2007. A Correlated Topic Model of Science. The Annals of Applied Statistics 1:1.17–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blei, David M., Andrew Y. Ng & Michael I. Jordan. 2003. Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 31.993–1022.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre, Thomas L. Griffiths & Dan Klein. 2009. Improved Reconstruc-tion of Protolanguage Word Forms. Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, 65–73. Boulder, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre, David Hall, Thomas L. Griffiths & Dan Klein. 2013. Auto-mated Reconstruction of Ancient Languages using Probabilistic Models of Sound Change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1101.4224–4229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre, Percy S. Liang, Thomas L. Griffiths & Dan Klein. 2007. A Probabilistic Approach to Diachronic Phonology. Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL), 887–896. Prague: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouchard-Côté, Alexandre, Percy S. Liang, Dan Klein & Thomas L. Griffiths. 2008. A Probabilistic Approach to Language Change. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 169–176.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Box, George E. P. 1980. Sampling and Bayes’ Inference in Scientific Modelling and Robustness. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) 1431.383–430. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Burrow, Thomas. 1975. A New Look at Brugmann’s Law. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38:1.55–80. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cardona, George & Dhanesh Jain. 2007. General Introduction. The Indo-Aryan Languages ed. by George Cardona & Dhanesh Jain, 2–45. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carpenter, Bob, Andrew Gelman, Matthew D. Hoffman, Daniel Lee, Ben Goodrich, Michael Betancourt, Marcus Brubaker, Jiqiang Guo, Peter Li & Allen Riddell. 2017. Stan: A Probabilistic Programming Language. Journal of Statistical Software 761. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chang, Will & Lev Michael. 2014. A Relaxed Admixture Model of Language Contact. Language Dynamics and Change 4:1.1–26. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chatterji, Suniti Kumar. 1926. The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta: Calcutta University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cohen, Shay B., Kevin Gimpel & Noah A. Smith. 2009. Logistic Normal Priors for Unsu-pervised Probabilistic Grammar Induction. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 321–328.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cohen, Shay B. & Noah A. Smith. 2009. Shared Logistic Normal Distributions for Soft Parameter Tying in Unsupervised Grammar Induction. In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 74–82. Boulder, CO: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deo, Ashwini. 2018. Dialects in the Indo-Aryan landscape. The Handbook of Dialectology ed. by Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne & Dominic Watt, 535–546. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elizarenkova, T. Y. 1989. About Traces of a Prakrit Dialectal Basis in the Language of the Rgveda. Dialectes dans les littératures indo-aryennes ed. by Colette Caillat, 1–18. Paris: Collège de France.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Emeneau, Murray B. 1966. The Dialects of Old-Indo-Aryan. Ancient Indo-European dialects ed. by Jaan Puhvel, 123–138. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frisk, Hjalmar. 1991. Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Band II: Kρ–Ω. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fritz, Sonja. 2002. The Dhivehi Language: a Descriptive and Historical Grammar of Maldivian and its Dialects. 21 vols. Heidelberg: Ergon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gelman, Andrew, Xiao-Li Meng & Hal Stern. 1996. Posterior Predictive Assessment of Model Fitness via Realized Discrepancies. Statistica Sinica 61.733–760.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gelman, Andrew & Donald B. Rubin. 1992. Inference from Iterative Simulation Using Multiple Sequences. Statistical Science 7:4.457–472. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geman, Stuart & Donald Geman. 1984. Stochastic Relaxation, Gibbs Distributions, and the Bayesian Restoration of Images. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 61.721–741. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grierson, George A. 1967 [1903–28]. Linguistic Survey of India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hammarström, Harald, Robert Forkel & Martin Haspelmath. 2017. Glottolog 3.3. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. [URL]
von Hinüber, Oskar. 2001. Das ältere Mittelindisch im Überblick. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hock, Hans Henrich. 2016. The Languages, their Histories, and their Genetic Classification. The Languages and Linguistics of South Asia: A Comprehensive Guide ed. by Hans Henrich Hock & Elena Bashir, 9–240. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoernle, A. F. Rudolf. 1880. A Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages. London: Trübner.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard. 2013. Phylogenetic Inference from Word Lists using Weighted Alignment with Empirically Determined Weights. Language Dynamics and Change 31.245–291. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jamison, Stephanie W. 1988. The Quantity of the Outcome of Vocalized Laryngeals in Indic. Die Laryngaltheorie und die Rekonstruktion des indogermanischen Laut- und Formensystems ed. by Alfred Bammesberger, 213–226. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jeffers, Robert J. 1976. The Position of the Bihārī Dialects in Indo-Aryan. Indo-Iranian Journal 18:3–4.215–225. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Joshi, S. D. 1989. Patañjali’s Views on Apaśabdas. Dialectes dans les littératures indo-aryennes ed. by Colette Caillat, 267–294. Paris: Collège de France.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kakati, Banikanta. 1941. Assamese, its Formation and Development. Gauhati: Government of Assam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kingma, Diederik P. & Jimmy Ba. 2015. Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kingma, Diederik P. & Adam Welling. 2013. Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kogan, Anton I. 2005. Dardskie jazyki. Genetičeskaja xarakteristika. Moscow: Vostočnaja Literatura.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koskenniemi, Kimmo. 2017. Aligning Phonemes using Finite-State Methods. Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, 56–64. Gothenburg: Linköping University Electronic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kucukelbir, Alp, Dustin Tran, Rajesh Ranganath, Andrew Gelman & David M. Blei. 2017. Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference. The Journal of Machine Learning Research 18:1.430–474.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuiper, Franciscus Bernardus Jacobus. 1991. Aryans in the Rigveda. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kümmel, Martin. 2015. Developments in the Dissolution of the Indo-Iranian Accentual System. Paper presented at the Workshop on Diachronic Morphophonology: Lexical Accent Systems at the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Naples, July 27–31.
Lipp, Reiner. 2009. Die indogermanischen und einzelsprachlichen Palatale im Indoiranischen. 21 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
List, Johann-Mattis. 2012. SCA. Phonetic Alignment based on Sound Classes. New Directions in Logic, Language, and Computation ed. by M. Slavkovik & D. Lassiter, 32–51. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacKenzie, David Neil. 1961. The Origins of Kurdish. Transactions of the Philological Society 68–86. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Marr, David. 1982. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Masica, Colin P. 1991. The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mayrhofer, Manfred. 1989–2001. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meylan, Stephan, Michael Frank & Roger Levy. 2013. Modeling the Development of Deter-miner Productivity in Children’s Early Speech. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 351.3032–3037.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meylan, Stephan C., Michael C. Frank, Brandon C. Roy & Roger Levy. 2017. The Emergence of an Abstract Grammatical Category in Children’s Early Speech. Psychological Science 28:2.181–192. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mimno, David, David M. Blei & Barbara E. Engelhardt. 2015. Posterior Predictive Checks to Quantify Lack-of-Fit in Admixture Models of Latent Population Structure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112:26.E3441–E3450. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mimno, David, Hanna Wallach & Andrew McCallum. 2008. Gibbs Sampling for Logistic Normal Topic Models with Graph-Based Priors. NIPS Workshop on Analyzing Graphs, 1–8.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Needleman, Saul B. & Christian D. Wunsch. 1970. A General Method Applicable to the Search for Similarities in the Amino Acid Sequence of Two Proteins. Journal of Molecular Biology 481.443–53. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Norton, Richard A., J. Andrés Christen & Colin Fox. 2017. Sampling Hyperparameters in Hierarchical Models: Improving on Gibbs for High-Dimensional Latent Fields and Large Datasets. Communications in Statistics-Simulation and Computation 471.2639–2655. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oberlies, Thomas. 2001. Pali: A Grammar of the Language of the Theravada Tipitaka. With a Concordance to Pischel’s Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. A Historical Grammar of Hindi. Graz: Leykam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Parkes, Peter. 1987. Livestock Symbolism and Pastoral Ideology among the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush. Man 221.637–660. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Parpola, Asko. 2002. Pre-Proto-Iranians of Afghanistan as Initiators of Śākta Tantrism: on the Scythian/Saka Affiliation of the Dāsas, Nuristanis and Magadhans. Iranica Antiqua 371.233–324. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peterson, John. 2017. Fitting the Pieces Together: Towards a Linguistic Prehistory of Eastern-Central South Asia (and beyond). Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 41.211–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pischel, Richard. 1900. Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pritchard, Jonathan K., Matthew Stephens & Peter Donnelly. 2000. Inference of Population Structure using Multilocus Genotype Data. Genetics 155:2.945–959.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ranganath, Rajesh, Linpeng Tang, Laurent Charlin & David Blei. 2015. Deep Exponential Families. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial intelligence and statistics (AISTATS), 762–771. San Diego, CA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rasmussen, C. E. & C. K. I. Williams. 2006. Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reesink, Ger, Ruth Singer & Michael Dunn. 2009. Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul using Population Models. PLoS Biology 7.e1000241. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rix, Helmut, Martin Kimmel, Thomas Zehnder, Reiner Lipp & Brigitte Schirmer eds. 2001. Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben: Die Wurzeln und ihre Primärstammbildungen. 2nd ed. Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Salvatier, John, Thomas V. Wiecki & Christopher Fonnesbeck. 2016. Probabilistic Program-ming in Python using PyMC3. Peer J Computer Science 2.e55. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shaked, Shaul. 1969. Notes on the New Aśoka Inscription from Kandahar. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 101:2.118–122.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slaje, Walter. 2014. Kingship in Kaśmīr (AD 1148–1459). Halle an der Saale: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Caley. 2017. The Dialectology of Indic. Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics ed. by Jared Klein, Brian Joseph & Matthias Fritz, 417–447. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Southworth, Franklin C. 2005. Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Srivastava, Akash & Charles Sutton. 2017. Autoencoding Variational Inference for Topic Models. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Syrjänen, Kaj, Terhi Honkola, Jyri Lehtinen, Antti Leino & Outi Vesakoski. 2016. Ap-plying Population Genetic Approaches within Languages: Finnish Dialects as Linguistic Populations. Language Dynamics and Change 61.235–283. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tedesco, P. 1960. Notes to Mayrhofer’s Etymological Sanskrit Dictionary. Journal of the American Oriental Society 80:4.360–366. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tedesco, Paul. 1945. Persian čīz and Sanskrit kím. Language 211.128–141. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1965. Turner’s Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages. Journal of the American Oriental Society 851.368–383. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Teh, Yee Whye, Michael I. Jordan, Matthew J. Beal & David M. Blei. 2005. Sharing Clusters among Related Groups: Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 1385–1392.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thiel-Horstmann, Monika. 1978. On RJ Jeffers: ‘The Position of the Bihārī Dialects in Indo-Aryan’ – A Phonological Reconsideration. Indo-Iranian Journal 20:1–2.61–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tran, Dustin, Matthew D. Hoffman, Rif A. Saurous, Eugene Brevdo, Kevin Murphy & David M. Blei. 2017. Deep Probabilistic Programming. arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.03757.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, Ralph L. 1962–1966. A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1916. The Indo-Germanic Accent in Marathi. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 203–251. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wieling, Martijn, Eliza Margaretha & John Nerbonne. 2012. Inducing a Measure of Phonetic Similarity from Pronunciation Variation. Journal of Phonetics 40:2.307–314. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Williamson, Sinead, Chong Wang, Katherine A. Heller & David M. Blei. 2010. The IBP Compound Dirichlet Process and its Application to Focused Topic Modeling. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning, Haifa, Israel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Witzel, Michael. 1989. Tracing the Vedic Dialects. Dialectes dans les littératures indo-aryennes ed. by Colette Caillat, 97–266. Paris: Collège de France.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yanovich, Igor. 2016. Old English *motan, Variable-Force Modality, and the Presupposition of Inevitable Actualization. Language 92:3.489–521. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zograf, G. A. 1976. Morfologičeskij stroj novyx indoarijskix jazykov. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zoller, Claus Peter. 1988. Bericht über besondere Archaismen im Bangani, einer Western Pahari-Sprache. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 491.173–200.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1989. Bericht über grammatische Archaismen im Bangani. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 501.159–218.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. A Note on Baṅgāṇi. Journal of the Linguistic Society of India 541.112–114.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Garhwali and the History of Indo-Aryan: Some Observations. Paper presented at Hindi Diwas (Day of Hindi). Uppsala, 14 September.
Zoller, Claus-Peter. 2016. Outer and Inner Indo-Aryan, and Northern India as an Ancient Linguistic Area. Acta Orientalia 771.71–132.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Cathcart, Chundra
2024. Frederik Hartmann: Germanic phylogeny . Folia Linguistica 58:s45-s1 ► pp. 325 ff. DOI logo
Ranacher, Peter, Nico Neureiter, Rik van Gijn, Barbara Sonnenhauser, Anastasia Escher, Robert Weibel, Pieter Muysken & Balthasar Bickel
2021. Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 18:181 ► pp. 20201031 ff. DOI logo
Borin, Lars, Anju Saxena, Bernard Comrie & Shafqat Mumtaz Virk
2020. A bird’s-eye view on South Asian languages through LSI. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 7:2 ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue