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
******************************************************
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.