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

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  • 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: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 18:02:15 +0000

On 21/01/2007 00:08, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
Dear Peter and Karl,

I very much recommend not relating to much to any assumed statistics.
The power curve is interesting but significant also is the fact that it does
not model the observed statistics properly, so much that Peter suggests
there are problems with the medial Vav and Resh. I could tentatively
consider the exceptional nature of the medial vav (namely, there are
often connections between medial vav roots and roots with equivalent
medial and final root letters) but the Resh is very problematic and I think
it is a big warning sign if the Resh cannot be explained. ...

But the resh can be explained, see the continuing discussion. The reduced frequency of resh homonyms is just about what would be expected from corrections to the original estimates because the assumption of small probabilities was breaking down.

... Yes, there may
be many more roots that contain a Resh, even twice as any set of roots
with any other observed letter, but that is no reason to ignore the Resh.
It must be remembered that the power curve, especially the version
described by Peter, is a theory and this theory has to be substantiated
as well. ...

The corrected version is not a power curve, but it is a more precise theory.

... Our base of roots is not a live language base of roots but is
already a selected sample of roots from a wide statistical population in
that the language of the Bible is only a sample from the complete
linguistic variety that existed in the years during which the Bible was
written. Peter's theory would have to hold true not just for a population
but also for such a sample from a population, and it would also have
to be shown true for other languages, namely Semitic languages.

Indeed, although there is no guarantee that the same principles of selection of roots apply even in other closely related languages. A test would have to be made on the verbs found in a similarly sized corpus of natural text. My hypothesis of randomness includes that natural text like the Hebrew Bible would use a more or less random selection of the verb roots available in the language, and the observations tend to confirm this. This assumption might not always apply; a text of a different kind might be less random, especially if deliberately edited to avoid ambiguities which might imply avoidance of less common homonyms.

... Roughly, the number of homonym roots
with a particular letter in the alphabet in their roots is proportional
to the total number of roots with that particular letter in their roots. ...

This is not what I have observed. My observations are much closer to a square law. Your own preferred graph does not support this either, as your straight line not through the origin implies a non-proportionality, that a letter needs a certain definite frequency before any homonyms at all are observed.

... The linear/proportional relationship is observed, and since a linear
relationship is the simplest relationship that can be considered it is
probably best to stick with it. ...

NO for at least three reasons:

1) This is NOT what is observed;

2) This is NOT what is predicted by any kind of theory, since it is trivially obvious to note that the probability that a new verb added to the list will be a homonym is not independent of the existing number of verbs;

3) This does NOT have the implications which you suggest for merger of letters, because of course if two letters do merge the number of verbs will add together, but the number of homonyms will more than add together because new homonyms have been created. This new homonym effect is not just a deviation but the essence of the issue.

... I think that if one truly
wanted to investigate the nature of the observed relationship one
would do the calculus to identify the relationship that is governed
by sound laws such as the above including the above mentioned
deviations. ...

Indeed, and that is what I have been trying to do. Why have you been ignoring my results, and insisting that the relationship must be linear even though the analysis as well as the data show that it is not?

... That is, the equation of the sound law unification of
phonemes lays the framework for computing through calculus the
relationship that is to be expected of a language in which this
was a governing principle. So that would be where I'd start, but
until then, I'd stick with the linear relationship which seems to
fit the observed data quite well, and because of its simple nature
does not also require complex explanations or substantiations.

You stick with your over-simplistic relationships which doesn't explain the observations if you like, an approach which sounds about as scholarly as Karl's, but I will follow a proper scholarly approach.

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





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