Biblical Hebrew Forum

[belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr]

Dear Karl and Rolf,

Thank you both very much:


> Dear Edward:
> Depending on who you ask, you'll get different answers. One answer   
> Isaw says that there are 1615 verbs, another 1325, and it could be   
> thatboth are wrong.


> Dear Edward,
>
> In my doctoral dissertation from 2005, 57.414
> finite and infinite verbs from the Tanakh have
> been analyzed; these are practically all the
> verbs extant in the text. Interestingly, any
> finite and infinite form can be used with past,
> present, and future reference, and each form can
> also have a modal force. There are, however,
> particular patterns.

The difference between answers is obvious: in the
first case, only roots are counted, in the second,
all instances of a verb appearence.

Thus, it remains to give the precise number of different
roots of verbs in the Hebrew Bible.

Surprisingly, this number is well known in the case of
the Modern Hebrew:
A Computational Lexicon of Contemporary
Hebrew, by Alon Itai, "the broadest-coverage publicly
available lexicon of Modern Hebrew, currently consisting
of over 20,000 entries" gives the "number of words in
the lexicon by main part of speech :
noun 10332 preposition 100
verb 4485 conjunction 62
properName 4227 pronoun 60
adjective 1612 interjection 40
adverb 352 interrogative 9
quantifier 132 negation 6
Total: 21,417"

Yours sincerely,

Edward G. Belaga
******************************************************
Institut de Recherche en Mathématique Avancée
Universite Louis Pasteur
7, rue René Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE
tel.: 333 90 24 02 35, FAX: 333 90 24 03 28
e-mail : edward.belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr
******************************************************


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