The Study of the Relationship Between the Russian and Buryat Languages Using the Matrix of Proximity Measures Between Consonant Word Classes

Abstract

The article proposes a new approach to study the connection between the Russian and Buryat languages, borrowings in the Buryat language, based on the methods of historical and mathematical linguistics. For the work, a frequency Russian-Buryat dictionary was used, in which each word was transformed using consonant classes, after which the Ratcliffe-Obershelp pairwise similarity metrics were calculated for the words of the dictionary and their transformed forms. But on the basis of the data obtained, a matrix of measures of proximity of consonant classes (MMCC) of words of two languages was built. Additionally, for a number of measures of each word, statistical characteristics were calculated - average, minimum, maximum, variance estimate. For Buryat words, the correlation coefficients of a series of measures that characterize the similarity of words were determined. As a result of the calculations, a measure of the similarity of the consonant classes of words in the Russian and Buryat languages was obtained, which characterizes the mutual influence of languages and the amount of borrowing of Russian forms in the Buryat language. The paper shows the effectiveness of the method of the matrix of similarity measures of consonantal classes of words for comparing languages.