Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Richard Steiner on Sin and Shin

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: B Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Richard Steiner on Sin and Shin
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:35:18 +0000

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/





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page