On Complexity of Persian Orthography: L-Systems Approach

To understand how the Persian language developed over time, we uncover the dynamics of complexity of Persian orthography. We represent Persian words by L-systems and calculate complexity measures of these generative systems. The complexity measures include degrees of non-constructability, generative complexity, and morphological richness; the measures are augmented with time series analysis. The measures are used in a comparative analysis of four representative poets: Rudaki (858-940 AD), Rumi (1207-1273), Sohrab (1928-1980), and Yas (1982-present). We find that irregularity of the Persian language, as characterized by the complexity measures of L-systems representing the words, increases over temporal evolution of the language.