Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 11/01/2007 19:13, Peter Kirk wrote:
> ...
> Given the morphological database, it would actually be rather trivial to 
> discover the proportions of homonyms for each letter, among three letter 
> verbal roots attested in the Hebrew Bible. I may even do this!
>
>   
I have just done a simple study of the percentage of homonyms among 
biblical Hebrew verb roots (triliteral only, Aramaic excluded). This is 
based on the Westminster morphological database - only on the existence 
of the root, not at all on its frequency. Note that I count 1 for two 
homonymous roots, 2 for three roots etc. These figures for each letter 
are the sums of the counts in which the letter is the first, the second 
and the third root letter. Note that I count he with mappiq as a 
separate letter (occurring as the third radical only) because the 
database lists them separately, and because these are not homonyms 
(almost completely separate paradigms) of the regular lamed-he verbs. It 
would also have been good to separate second root letter vav verbs into 
those with consonantal vav and "hollow" verbs, but the data did not 
allow this.

The first set of statistics is based on counting sin and shin as 
separate letters

Columns: transliterated letter; total no. of roots; no of homonyms; 
percentage of homonyms

)    178    28    15.73%
B    253    46    18.18%
G    135    12    8.89%
D    194    24    12.37%
H    299    68    22.74%
H.    8    0    0.00%
W    176    35    19.89%
Z    104    19    18.27%
X    291    55    18.90%
+    109    10    9.17%
Y    118    13    11.02%
K    159    17    10.69%
L    312    67    21.47%
M    241    40    16.60%
N    271    41    15.13%
S    140    18    12.86%
(    280    56    20.00%
P    248    35    14.11%
C    179    33    18.44%
Q    219    25    11.42%
R    481    108    22.45%
$    259    30    11.58%
&    77    10    12.99%
T    114    11    9.65%
total    4845    801    16.53%

The second set of statistics is based on counting sin and shin as a 
single letter, and forms for which there are sin-shin pairs are 
considered as homonyms

)    178    30    16.85%
B    253    48    18.97%
G    135    16    11.85%
D    194    27    13.92%
H    299    71    23.75%
H.    8    0    0.00%
W    176    38    21.59%
Z    104    19    18.27%
X    291    62    21.31%
+    109    12    11.01%
Y    118    15    12.71%
K    159    22    13.84%
L    312    68    21.79%
M    241    41    17.01%
N    271    45    16.61%
S    140    18    12.86%
(    280    61    21.79%
P    248    38    15.32%
C    179    33    18.44%
Q    219    30    13.70%
R    481    118    24.53%
#    336    71    21.13%
T    114    11    9.65%
total    4845    894    18.45%


Note that the percentages of homonyms for sin and shin taken separately 
are 11.58% and 12.99%, and for the two taken together is 21.13%. All of 
these figures are well within the range of percentages for other letters 
(9% to 22% when sin and shin are separate, 11% to 24% when they are 
taken together, excluding the rare he with mappiq which has no homonyms).

As predicted, ayin and het have rather high proportions of homonyms, but 
not as high as he (for which there are special factors - these are 
mostly lamed-he verbs), lamed and resh. Surprisingly, resh has by far 
the largest number of roots - 481, of which 210 have resh as the third 
root letter. The large number of roots partially accounts for the large 
proportion of homonyms - a more sophisticated study would correct for 
this factor. Sin and shin combined would come in second place for number 
of roots with 336, but easily in first place for 174 with sin or shin as 
first root letter.

Conclusion: This approach doesn't help one way or the other. It 
certainly doesn't prove Karl's hypothesis. Nor does it disprove it.

Karl, you may be interested in this list of all the sin-shin pair verbs 
which I found:

XP#
X#K
Y#M
NG#
N#)
N#Q
(#Q
(#R
PR#
P#(
#B(
#BR
#GG
#GH
#DD
#WX
#W+
#WR
#XH
#X+
#XQ
#YX
#KK
#KL
#KR
#N)
#(R
#QD
#QR
#RH
#RR

I can send the Excel spreadsheet from which I derived this on request, 
off list.

Do I get a master's degree for this, about an hour's work (since I had 
the basic database set up already)?

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
Blog:    http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/