Dust: Root word initial letter pairs

Friday 4 December 2020

Root word initial letter pairs

Here’s a table of all the used pairs of letters that begin a Hebrew root. I have used + for tet.

This is difficult for my eyes to process. There are exactly 401 combinations including the 5 singles. So the sums on the sides and the bottom which exclude the 5 should add up to 396. I think they do.

Rows

mem m is a full row including itself as a 1 character stem (that's because I excluded enclitic pronouns as roots.)
shin/sin w is a full row. Interesting that its single character use as a prefix is always with another root, so it doesn't show as a single character. (Rule: 1 root per word.)
yod i is a full row.
nun n is a full row except for its own doubling as the first two characters of a root.
vav v has the most gaps as a row.

Columns

vav v is a full column as a second letter.
Similarly i. Are these proto vowels?
tsade x has the most gaps as second letter.
zayin z, tet + and samech s follow with 8 gaps each.

Note that 4 letters, a, i, y, and w account for the first letter of the root for 47% of the words in the canon.

Word frequency for the first letter of roots in the Hebrew bible

Why are some sounds and sound combinations more frequent than others? e.g. ay - aleph ayin is rare, only 1 root (3 words) in Ezra for timber.

Word frequency by initial pairs of consonants for roots in the Hebrew Bible

For the second graph see the concordance page for the detail data breakdown.

The rare counts and the high counts are these. I suspect this tells us which pronunciations were easy and which were awkward.

1 aq,h,hc,hq,hw,hx,lt,nl,tz,vh,vi,vn,vp,wx,zg,zz

2 s't,ss,ya

3 ay,'ta,'t't,hk,tg

4 ld,m,qt,td,tt

5 'tn,gh,lg,qa,zp

6 dp,pc,ys

7 zt

8 c,i't,zk

10 hs,rs

5723 bn

5764 wm

6362 cl

7263 aw

7737 am

8159 yl

8510 ih

11432 al

13055 at

Dust

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Friday 4 December 2020

Root word initial letter pairs

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