...I have just done a simple study of the percentage of homonyms among biblical Hebrew verb roots (triliteral only, Aramaic excluded). This is based on the Westminster morphological database - only on the existence of the root, not at all on its frequency. Note that I count 1 for two homonymous roots, 2 for three roots etc. These figures for each letter are the sums of the counts in which the letter is the first, the second and the third root letter. Note that I count he with mappiq as a separate letter (occurring as the third radical only) because the database lists them separately, and because these are not homonyms (almost completely separate paradigms) of the regular lamed-he verbs. It would also have been good to separate second root letter vav verbs into those with consonantal vav and "hollow" verbs, but the data did not allow this.
Given the morphological database, it would actually be rather trivial to discover the proportions of homonyms for each letter, among three letter verbal roots attested in the Hebrew Bible. I may even do this!
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.