Distinguishing aleph-lamed-yod from itself

When is אלי my God and when is it to me? 

And when is the root of such a word /al/ rather than /alvh/? Apparently when /al/ is the root, it may be derived from /ail/, ram, hart, or potency.

I was surprised to remind myself how extensive that root /al/ is. Of course it is many things besides its usage as God. Interpreting always of course, in the canonical text, 

• there are a total of 6,586 uses of this letter pair as a root. 
• I count 30 uses as god in the generic sense, 
• 114 as God, 67 as part of a location name, 
• 5 occurrences in Daniel in a form signifying lo, 
• 840 uses as a negative particle, 
• 6 uses as the demonstrative these in Daniel and Ezra, 
• and the rest of the thousands in various forms as a preposition. You can scan the lot here.

It was curious to me (אלי) that the same three letter form /ali/ is also used 11 times for the generic singular root of alohim (2,763 uses in its various word forms). Why would some forms be interpreted as root /al/ and 11 others as /alvh/? Assigning these to the root alvh of course makes them unambiguous. (See Is 44:17, Ps 18:3, 22:2, 22:11, 63:2, 68:25, 89:77, 102:25, 118:28, 140:7. The poetic meter is also a consideration. אל is used for God frequently in Psalms and Job, not at all in Proverbs and less so in the prose books.)

This question came up because of the compactness of Exodus 32:26. mi lihvh alii. The Hebrew gives no clue for punctuation. I had translated it as 'Who is for Yahweh, my God?' The pointing and the SimHebrew (the fully spelled text) seem to demand that אלי be translated as 'to me'.

Exodus 32:26 - the music gives no indication of a discontinuous phrase.

I have changed the translation, but I find it a concern. Is the music incapable of expressing discontinuity? No it is not. Any number of ornaments could have indicated a disjunction. But this phrase, which occurs in the accent sequences over 1500 times, never invites such a break.

For more on the incident of the golden calf, try the Torah site, e.g. here. And here is a pdf on the chiastic structure of the passage, of which this verse is the centre. Couldn't find online a scholarly opinion on this translation issue. There is an interesting pdf on the violence of Levi here. In the days when I would write, I did some commentary here.

There is one other example in Psalms 7:7. In this case, I see that translations vary between 'to me' and 'my God'. The majority go with 'to me'.

Arise Yahweh, in your anger, be lifted up in the outbursts of my adversary,
and be aroused, my God, judgment you command.

To render this as 'to me' is not impossible personally or theologically, but there is a parallel that is lost. And here the music much more effectively supports the parallel.

Psalms 7:7