Letter pairs again - the gutturals aleph and ayin

 For a change of pace, I have updated all the concordance pages, (though I had said I would not). As I do it, I see again the curious facts about initial pairs of letters in roots. I posted about them in 2020 particularly here: root letter pairs that begin words.

The posts outline the missing and rare combinations. I wonder what one can imagine about these missing and low-frequency pairs.

Beginning with a - aleph, a guttural, there are no roots beginning with aa. Would we expect a double aleph anywhere? Yes. there are verbs beginning with a, and some of them are found in first person imperfect where aleph is a critical prefix. So a doubled guttural is not out of the question: E.g.

אאר I will curse Genesis 12:3
אאזרך I have girded you Isaiah 45:5
אאריך I will slow Isaiah 48:9
אאסף I will gather Micah 2:12
אאריך I should prolong Job 6:11
אאמין I would believe Job 9:16
אאמצכם I would assure you Job 16:5
ואאלפך and I will captain your Job 33:33
בדתאא in the verdant herb Daniel 4:12
בדתאא in the verdant herb Daniel 4:20

Note also the words that end with aa, for the Aramaic definite article. 

There is only one root beginning with ay, and that is the Hebrew for timber. And there is only one root beginning with ya, the Aramaic for wood. 

But there are many words with 'ay' in them - here's a few examples:

אעלה I will ascend Song 7:9
אעשה I will undertake Amos 4:12
אעזבך I will forsake you 2 Kings 2:2
אעלזה I will exult Psalms 60:8
אעופה that I may fly away Psalms 55:7
ואעידה and I will witness Psalms 50:7

A quick scan says that all the instances (apart from the three of timber) are from the first person imperfect, often rendered as simple future.

And there are several (165) instance of words containing 'ya' - ayin-aleph. Many of these are names and one is the Aramaic root bya, which I have glossed as seek. Again in Aramaic the definite article contributes some examples.

מיזרעאל from Jezreel 1 Samuel 25:43
בעינא we sought Daniel 2:23
ארעא the earth Daniel 2:39
רביעאה the fourth Daniel 2:40
מארעא from the earth Jeremiah 10:11
ישמעאל Yishmaeil Jeremiah 41:16
סיעא Siaha Nehemiah 7:47

בפאת in quarter Amos 3:12

My tentative thought is that some letter combinations are hard to pronounce so we tend not to use them. Some that do creep into the language may be loan words. I am going to explore some more of these rarities - as a diversion. The next missing pair is missing for both sequences: bp and pb. That may be true of several of the missing pairs - in this case they are both labial. There are 83 missing combinations - and this does not identify the ones where there are only one or two words, so it will take a few posts.