uc and ucak

[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The point that you make is quite right, but I believe that what you are
dealing with is likelihood instead of mathematical probability. What lies
at the bottom of the problem is that the lay word probability most
commonly has the meaning 'likelihood' that is the relation between the
respective probabilities associated with each outcome. ID.
 
On Wed, 28 Oct 1998, Larry Trask wrote:
 
> ----------------------------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
>