rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, bwald wrote:
 
> P.S.  Trask's admonition on probability of chance resemblances reminds me
> of the classic probability problem:  how many people do you need in a room
> before there is a more than chance
> (p > .5) probability that TWO will have the same birthday?  I forgot the
> answer, something around 30 (cntr. 366 possible birthdays).  The answer
> says NOTHING about which date this will be.  The probability for that
> remains 1 in 365 and a 1/4 (p < .003).  Koestler's fallacy is alive and
> well in popular American culture in the "strange-but-true" folklore about
> how many "famous" Americans were either born or died on July 4.  There are
> many other variants of such folklore, e.g., Cabalistic-like algorithms
> about probability of deaths in office for US presidents and such, depending
> on year, their ordinal rank as presidents, the number of letters in their
> names, etc etc.
 
The answer is in fact 23.  Put 23 arbitrary people in a room, and the
probability that two of them will share a birthday date (not an actual
date of birth) exceeds 50%.  Put 40 people in the room, and the
probability exceeds 90%.
 
Most people won't believe this, and you can win a few bets this way.
I've done so, with first-year groups of around 45 students.  I've never
lost, though I must lose eventually.  One year, when I announced my bet,
there was widespread giggling.  It turned out that, unknown to me, the
class contained a pair of twins.  So I magnanimously agreed to count the
twins as one person, and I won anyway.
 
As Benji points out, human beings are woefully bad at estimating
probabilities.  Mostly, I think, we tend to interpret `random
distribution' as `disperse distribution', meaning that we tend to assume
that independent events have a tendency to avoid one another.  They
don't, or they wouldn't be random.
 
The linguistic consequences of this failing are all too obvious.
Ancient Greek for `honey' was <meli>, and Hawaiian for `honey' is
<meli>.  Wow!  I can hear Arthur Koestler telling us that Something
Deeply Significant is going on here.  But, of course, neither the Greeks
nor the Hawaiians had any interest in ensuring that their words for
`honey' were different, nor any means of doing so.
 
Collect enough languages, and enough words, and you're going to be
drowning in such coincidences.  Standard Italian <due> `two' is a lot
more similar to Malay <dua> `two' than it is to Neapolitan Italian
<ruj@> `two'.  In fact, looking at that list of number names on the Web
( http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/numbers.shtml ) can be quite an
illuminating experience.  English /tu:/ and German /tsvai/ do not look
to be closely related, nor do the Kashmiri dialect variants /zi/ and
/do:/, nor do the Pashto variants /bu/, /lu/ and /do:v/, nor does
Armenian /erku/ look like anything else IE -- yet all are cognate.
 
Historical linguistics 15, miscellaneous resemblances 0.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk