Biblical Hebrew Forum

[belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr]

You get it ...

Hebrew (and partially, Semitic languages) possess another  
complementary, closely related with the first one even if a priory  
fully independent "unique, fundamental, and 'primeval' feature not  
shared by other languages" and sure not available in artificial  
Assembler languages: typically, a change in a consonant transforms the  
root of the verb to a semantically related verb.

This is why the redundacy you mentiont is not so important. In other  
words, it looks like the set of verbs is a sort of a "living organism"  
-- but it will carry us too far from our moderators ... Anyway, modern  
Hebrew does not respect this feature of its honorable ancestor.

Dr. 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 , cellular: 336 76 29 63 04
e-mail : edward.belaga AT math.u-strasbg.fr
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Quoting James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>:

> Hi,
>
> that's an interesting thought. If it was bi-consonantal with 22
> different characters we would be limited to 22*22=484 basic roots. But
> with triconsonant we have a maximum possible range of 10,648. There is
> a massive amount of redundancy in this figure, though, because usually
> about 2,000 core roots account for about 70% of any particular language.
>
> James Christian
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.



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