Possible languages: Hebrew and others

Even if one finds a language, which amino acid should correspond to which letter?

English has 26 letters and is a poor fit! I couldn’t find a language with 21 letters, but classical Latin rather briefly had 23. Three languages which have 22 letters are the closely related Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Hebrew is very similar to Aramaic and both are derived from the ancient Mediterranean trading language, Phoenician. Hebrew and Aramaic are probably about as far apart as Queen’s English and broad Scottish English. They are mutually mostly intelligible, but one has to concentrate. Some words are unique to each.

We have a rather fragmentary record of Phoenician, and certainly not enough to get a reliable letter frequency list, particularly for the uncommon letters. For that, my experience shows you need text equivalent to about half the Old Testament (about half a million letters). Hebrew was ahead on that score.

Another 22 letter language was Bishop Daniel’s version of Armenian (several hundred years AD) but we have the same problem – the textual record was inadequate.

We will compare Latin, English and Hebrew with the order of the amino acids and see which might be better, i.e., yield more meaningful words.

English

I used the frequency list used in cryptography and tabulated in Wikipedia (Anonymous 2016).

Latin

This just might be a target language.

At one stage Classical Latin had 23 letters, which might make it a candidate. However Latin has changed several times, and added and subtracted letters. So which Latin should I choose? And when I got a frequency list from classical Latin authors, two letters r and n, had the same frequency, and letters f and g were the same frequency, making interpretation even more ambiguous. The order details are here.

Aramaic

This has 22 letters but the letter frequencies appear similar to Hebrew, with y, h and w predominating. Hebrew also had a large, established central document to mine for letter frequencies, the Old Testament, so seemed a more promising candidate.

Hebrew

Using a consonant-only Hebrew text kindly supplied by Biola University, Los Angeles, my count of frequencies for letters in the 1.2 million character text of the OT (without modern vowel signs) is as follows: