Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Peter Kirk's homonym percentage table

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: B Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Peter Kirk's homonym percentage table
  • Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:48:26 +0000

On 16/01/2007 18:57, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
...

This is a restatement of your "observation" much differently than it was
before you investigated the numbers. In any case, I am glad you approve
of his numbers because as far as I can see, his numbers assume your
"observation" is false. ...

Indeed. But if Karl's hypothesis is true, there is a smaller number of homonyms with either sin or shin, in fact 40 rather than 71, which would put the percentage of homonyms slightly at the low end of the distribution rather than slightly at the high end. On the other hand, even if sin and shin were originally one letter, one would expect a certain number of sin-shin homonym pairs consistent with the proportion of homonyms observed for every other letter.

But the plot you have suggested indeed shows that if the figure of 40 rather than 71 is used this falls significantly off the curve. If sin and shin are taken separately, the figure for shin of 259/30 also falls a little below the pack, but does not stand out from it as clearly as 336/40.

...

In other words, your "observation" was that there are very rare cases where
Shin/Sin pairs of words are homonyms as opposed to the "synonyms."
Peter's data assumes that all Shin/Sin pairs are homonyms. Furthermore,
Peter does not check your claim. To check your claim one has to calculate
some 230 values for each possible pair of two letters (alef-bet, alef-gimel,
and so on) to determine how likely is it that the interchange of the two
letters will give us a homonym. Then we check the Shin-Sin pair against
all other pairs. Well, I'm not going to do that.

I doubt if there is enough data for this study.

...

When graphed, the data clearly show that there is a nice upwards curve.
Resh's data point appears way out there because there are so many
number of roots that have Resh in Peter's list. The question is: why is
there such a nice curve? why do the data for the letters cluster around
a curved line? ...

I suspect that the graph follows something like a 2/3 power curve passing through the origin. This is because of how I think the statistics work, but it does fit the graph reasonably well. Passing through the origin is essential because zero roots implies zero homonyms. Indeed the data point for he with mappiq is also a good one: just eight roots implies zero homonyms. But the calculation needs to be done separately for first, second and third root letters. The figures in column X of my spreadsheet are based on this hypothesis. These figures are fairly constant, as would be expected. The high figure for sin on its own is because of the four homonyms for sin as the second root letter of which three are (alleged) homonyms of (&H.

...
...

That is, if one assumes as do you that Sin and Shin never describe a
difference
in meaning, one has trouble explaining that odd data point. If one
assumes that
Sin and Shin always describe a difference in meaning, as Peter did, then,
well,
isn't that reason to consider them unique phonemes?

Yitzhak, thanks for your clear reasoning on this. The data now clearly imply that there are sin-shin homonyms, because if all observed sin-shin pairs are simply variations of the same root the number of homonyms involving sin or shin is far too low.

But I think Karl could rescue his theory than sin and shin were originally one phoneme by abandoning his suggestion that there are no sin-shin homonyms, and accepting rather that most of the sin-shin pairs arise from resolution of homonym pairs, as I in fact assumed. So I don't think these data help us to resolve the question of whether sin and shin were originally separate in Hebrew.

--
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