Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper explores the hypothesis of the historical evolution of Semitic morphology from biconsonantal (2C) etymons, to triconsonantal (3C) roots, which make up the majority of words in Biblical Hebrew as well as in other Semitic languages such as modern Hebrew, Arabic, etc. The rules for reducing the 3C roots to their 2C etymons are provided in detail. We use BHSA, a manually annotated corpus of the Hebrew Bible, and Word2Vec, a method for converting words to a vector representing their semantic meaning, to study the hypothesis of evolution from 2C etymons to 3C roots in biblical Hebrew. Namely, we show that words in Hebrew with different roots, that might have originated from the same 2C etymons form a denser cluster than random sets of words of the same size. These differences are statistically significant and strongly support the hypothesis of evolution from 2C etymons to 3C roots.