Linguistic Analysis using Paninian System of Sounds and Finite State Machines

The study of spoken languages comprises phonology, morphology, and grammar. Analysis of a language can be based on its syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The languages can be classified as root languages, inflectional languages, and stem languages. All these factors lead to the formation of vocabulary which has commonality/similarity as well as distinct and subtle differences across languages. In this paper, we make use of Paninian system of sounds to construct a phonetic map and then words are represented as state transitions on the phonetic map. Each group of related words that cut across languages is represented by a m-language (morphological language). Morphological Finite Automata (MFA) are defined that accept the words belonging to a given m-language. This exercise can enable us to better understand the inter-relationships between words in spoken languages in both language-agnostic and language-cognizant manner.