An application of persistent homology and the graph theory to linguistics: The case of Tifinagh and Phoenician scripts

Hajar Bouazzaoui; Mohamed Abdou Elomary; My Ismail Mamouni

doi:10.21307/stattrans-2021-031

An application of persistent homology and the graph theory to linguistics: The case of Tifinagh and Phoenician scripts

Hajar Bouazzaoui Hassan I University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science FST de Settat, IMII Laboratory. Address: Km 3, B.P.: 577 Route de Casablanca, Morocco ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1860-9757 , Mohamed Abdou Elomary Hassan I University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science FST de Settat, IMII Laboratory. Address: Km 3, B.P.: 577 Route de Casablanca, Morocco , My Ismail Mamouni Department of Mathematics, Research Team of Mathematics, Didactic and its Applications (M@DA), CRMEF RABAT, Avenue Allal Al Fassi, Madinat Al Irfane, 10000, Rabat, Morocco Statistics in Transition new series, vol. 22, 2021, 3, pages: 141–156 Published online: 6 September 2021 DOI 10.21307/stattrans-2021-031

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ABSTRACT

As the origin of the Tifinagh script remains uncertain, this work aims at exploring its probable relatedness with the Phoenician script. Using tools from within topological data analysis and graph theory, the similarity between the two scripts is studied. The clustering of their letter shapes is performed based on the pairwise distances between their topological signatures. The ideas presented in this work can be extended to study the similarity between any two writing systems and as such can serve as the first step for linguists to determine the possibly related scripts before conducting further analysis.

KEYWORDS

topological data analysis, persistent homology, graph theory, writing systems, Abjad scripts, Alphabet scripts, Tifinagh script, Phoenician script

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