Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Peter:

My friend is retired, and doesn't really want to investigate the
question. I thought that since he's retired, he would welcome an
intellectual question to stave off boredom.

However, from a strict probability viewpoint, he said that we should
expect no more than one homonym every 21 * 22 roots (assuming that
shin and sin are one letter), or about four for the whole group.

I went through the list of homonyms that you provided, taking out all
those where I questioned if they could be homonyms, and ended up with
19, and I question at least one of those. That is a far cry from the
267 that you list.

(A couple of those with a medial waw I removed because though they
were written the same, in one case the waw was used as a consonant,
while the second time as a mater lexionis. Hence, they are not
homonyms, just homographs.)

Yours, Karl W. Randolph.

On 1/21/07, Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org> wrote:
> On 21/01/2007 05:53, K Randolph wrote:
> > Peter:
> >
> > I'm having an intuitive reaction that something doesn't seem right
> > here. I don't know enough to be able to tell what is wrong, but if the
> > formula is correct, it should not be giving the obviously incorrect
> > response for the resh.
> >
> >
> The original formula was not completely correct in that it involved some
> approximations which were not completely valid. The adjusted formula
> should be more correct, but is too complex to calculate precisely. My
> estimate of the result given by the new formula is in the same region as
> the observed figures for resh. But in fact I would be rather surprised
> to see a precise fit, for the basic assumptions I made in the
> hypothesis, that verb roots are randomly distributed with no tendency to
> avoid homonyms, seem so unlikely.
>
> > I sent a copy of the spreadsheet with some explanatory info. to a
> > friend who has a PhD in statistics, but he hasn't responded yet.
> >
> >
> I would be interested in any response.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
> Blog:    http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
> Website: http://www.qaya.org/