uc and ucak

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, H.M.Hubey wrote:
 
> I am going to ask something that sounds very strange.
 
> I noticed accidentally that a word like 'uchakka' (that is
> reasonably close) meant 'to fly' in Sanskrit. (I hope that was
> Sanskrit, and not Indic or Hindi).
 
> In any case, it is very strange for me to see this since
> 'uch' means 'to fly' in Turkic. The choices are
 
> 1. Accident
> 2. There is something we are missing
>         2.a) Uch was borrowed into Turkic
>         2.b) "uch" is protoworld
>         2.c) The root comes from the Ancient ME (ANE)
 
> There might be more but these are good enough for a start.
 
> 1) with odds of 1 to 100 or 1 to 1000, it behooves not to
> believe this at first.
 
No, not so, I'm afraid.
 
If you ask the question "what is the probability that a form <uch> will
mean `fly' in both Turkish and Sanskrit?", then the *a priori* odds
against are simply enormous.  But that's the wrong question.
 
The right question is this: what is the probability that *some* short
form will turn up in *some* two languages with similar meanings in both?
And this time the answer is "as close to 100% as you care to get".
 
With 6000+ languages available, all of them with thousands of words, and
with only a small number of distinguishable consonants and vowels
available to construct those words, it is statistically inconceivable
that we should fail to find many, many chance resemblances or identities
like this one.  Hence stumbling across one is evidence for nothing at
all, except that the laws of probability are not taking the day off.
 
Failure to appreciate this constitutes what somebody has dubbed
"Koestler's fallacy", since the writer Arthur Koestler was notoriously
prone to it.  Koestler was constantly impressed by the observation that
*some particular* coincidence had occurred, reasoning that the *a
priori* odds against that particular coincidence were astronomical, and
hence concluding that Something Deeply Significant was going on.  What
he always failed to realize is that the probability that *some
coincidence or other* would occur purely by chance was effectively 100%.
 
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk