Abstract
Pāṇini defines the sound classes involved in grammatical rules by pratyāhāras, i.e., a two-letter code based on the order of the sounds in the Śivasūtras. In the present paper we demonstrate that Pāṇini’s pratyāhāra method is generalizable to the description of the phonological systems of other languages by applying it to the sound classes and phonological alternations of German. Furthermore, we compare Pāṇini’s pratyāhāra technique with the technique of describing phonological classes by phonological features, which is more common in Western phonology. It turns out that pratyāhāras perform better than features for the description of our sample of German phonological processes if one considers the quality criterion for class-description devices proposed by [10] which is based on the ratio of describable to actual classes.
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Petersen, W., Hamann, S. (2010). On the Generalizability of Pāṇini’s Pratyāhāra-Technique to Other Languages. In: Jha, G.N. (eds) Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. ISCLS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6465. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17528-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17528-2_2
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