Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages

ArXi:2604.11565v1 Announce Type: new We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we argue that phoneme sequences modeled as second-order Marko chains essentially capture the statistical correlations of a phonological system.