An Expert System for Analyzing the Phonetic Correspondence between Ryukyu Dialect and Standard Japanese

According to linguistic research, the mainland-Japanese dialects and the Ryukyu dialects have the same origin even though they have very different forms now. One factor which supports the thesis that they have the same origin is that a systematic law of phonetic correspondence exists betweon them. In order to investigate the phonetic law more objectively, we propose a word transformation system which synthesizes words of the Ryukyu-Shuri dialect from those of the Tokyo dialect (standard Japanese). In the system, the phonetic law is embodied in the IFTHEN rules of the OPS5. Using this system, we transformed nouns of the Tokyo dialect into words of the Ryukyu-Shuri dialect. It was found that 49% of the generated basic vocabularies agree with real nouns of the Ryukyu-Shuri dialect. Because the phonetic law can be prescribed in an explicit form in the system, we can study the phonetic law more objectively by this system than by the manual research of traditional dialectology