Modeling Intelligibility of Written Germanic Languages: Do We Need to Distinguish between Orthographic Stem and Affix Variation?
نویسندگان
چکیده
We measured orthographic differences between five Germanic languages. First, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages does not correlate with orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. We found this hypothesis true when considering the aggregated stem and affix distances between the languages. We also correlated the stem and affix distances of the cognate pairs per language pair. We found low correlations, the lowest of them being not significant. Second we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages is larger than orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. Also this hypothesis was found to be true. Orthographic distance is likely to be a potential predictor of written intelligibility, but when modeling written intelligibility a distinction need to be made between stem and affix distances given our results.
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