One and two letter verb roots: finding the missing letters

[Bielikov]

When your Hebrew grammar begins to answer the questions you have pondered, then it becomes a delight to study grammar. Kittel et al (Biblical Hebrew, Yale) does a nice job of introducing ways of finding the missing letter in prefix forms. She calls them the "missing letter rules." Naama Zahavi Ely has a page, also, with some of the exceptions (a bit strange as Naama does not use final letter forms, which threw me off at first). Beside these two, any suggestions on clues for finding the missing root letter in two-letter roots? I would love either more rules (Kittel offers 4 rules) or the exceptions.

[Iconoclaste]

I don't have this textbook and I'm not the most knowledgable in Tiberian vowels, but I can imagine that a words search for ?ו? (that's a Hebrew vav) and taking a look at the inflected forms in the analysis tab might be a useful exercise. I've also used Accordance grammatical tags to learn more about particular stems and try to identify patterns.

For example, in a Hebrew reading class that I was leading, we came across the pilpel and the polal, which our first and second year Hebrew grammar textbooks had not prepared us for. A quick search for these stems helped reveal that they basically existed as alternatives to the piel stem in geminate verbs or in hollow verbs (which is the term that I know for two-letter roots).