Homophonic quotients of linguistic free groups: German, Korean, and Turkish

Abstract

The homophonic quotient groups for French and English (i.e., the quotient of the free group generated by the French/English alphabet determined by relations representing standard pronunciation rules) were explicitly characterized by Mestre et al. (1993). We apply the same methodology to three different language systems: German, Korean, and Turkish. We argue that our results point to some interesting differences between these three languages (or at least their current script systems).