Just for a change, having looked at the ordering of Hebrew roots by their second and third letter patterns, I thought I would escape from the dominance of the first letter and examine the middle letter of the three letter roots.
How many three-letter Hebrew roots are there? I count 1,938. This is the most common length (47.6% of all roots). Of these roots, almost 200 have middle letter vav.
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| Frequency of the middle letter of a three-letter Hebrew root |
The three-letter roots account for 190,382 words in the Hebrew Bible -- about 62% of the total.
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| Frequency of words based on three-letter Hebrew roots |
There is a whole lot to say, I am sure, of how these words sound and what types of sound sequences are comfortable or common in the language. It's curious to me that vav is the most frequently used 'middle' letter - curious because the letter 'v' often disappears in the various words forms of these 'hollow' roots.
Gesenius divides the Hebrew alphabet by sound classification as follows:
(a) Gutturals a h y k; (21,105)(b) Palatals g c q; (12,101)
(c) Dentals d 't t; (15,601)
(d) Labials b p; (19,177)
(e) Sibilants x s w ; (24,224)
(f) Sonants i v l r m n. (96,125)
At just over 50%, the sonants dominate the middle sound of a root.
