Dust: The matrix of letter pairs for the Hebrew concordance

Tuesday 1 February 2022

The matrix of letter pairs for the Hebrew concordance

When I first looked at a Hebrew lexicon, I wanted to see the frequency of use of the letters. One question was - how would I design a concordance by volume? If it was by single letter, some volumes would be too big and some too small. It turned out that letter pairs would work as an organizational scheme, and by the size of the pages, one could tell something about the language.

There are 401 'pages' in my concordance. That means that there are several missing. 22 x 22 would mean I should have 484 pages (+5 for the single prefixes). So 88 pages are missing.

Look at this picture again. Can you see 88 empty slots? Subtract each right column count from 22 and add them up and it comes to 88. Each empty slot has or doesn't have a paired empty slot which is the reverse of the two missing letters. The image with the empty slots highlighted is below.

If there is a ^ in an empty slot, then its corresponding reverse pair is not empty, i.e. there are roots beginning with these two letters. If there is a # in the slot then both pairs are empty, i.e. there are no words beginning with these two letters.

Of the 88 empty slots 40 have # in them, 20 on each side of the diagonal containing the double letters. If you joined them with a line, the lines would all be parallel to each other - some shorter, some longer.

And 37 empty slots have ^ in them showing that their corresponding pair has a page for that letter pair. The remaining 11 slots are the empty double letters (half the alphabet).

Next post we will see if these pairs, like bp pb, ever show up anywhere in a Hebrew word.

Dust

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Tuesday 1 February 2022

The matrix of letter pairs for the Hebrew concordance

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