An Echo workup · one truism, in full

An arm and a leg,
in many tongues

“It cost an arm and a leg.”

The motif beneath the words: the price is paid in pieces of yourself.

When something costs too much, six tongues reach into the body to say so: an arm, an eye, a rib, the skin. Two more decline the image entirely and reach for money instead. This is the mixed case: partial convergence, a single-lineage cluster hiding inside it, and an honest divergence that keeps the whole finding humble.

verdict: mixed
Act I · the decomposition

Exchange, part-whole, diminishment

Vocabulary's re-frame, adopted: 'body-part-as-price' is not a single schema but a filler DOMAIN sitting on a schema set: S26 EXCHANGE primary (price as transfer), S21 PART-WHOLE (the part belongs to the body), S19 DIMINISHMENT (losing it reduces the self). The wealth group keeps S26 and S19 but drops S21: money is not part of the body. Function F05 OBSERVE primary, F01 WARN secondary; the canonical complaining force awaits the parked F13 COMPLAIN/LAMENT decision.

The level of this echo
The body group agrees at the schema set and the domain, then splits at the filler: arm and leg, eyes, skin, a rib. Inside it the Romance eye-quartet moves in lockstep, which reads as one inheritance, not four arrivals. English limbs and the Dutch rib are the genuine partial-convergence residual. And two tongues refuse the body altogether: the level of this echo is the domain, held honestly alongside the tongues that never joined it.

the body as the price

body (part of the self)
filler: arm + leg / eyes / skin / rib
Paying as physical loss: the cost is a piece of you. The domain converges; the chosen part diverges, and that divergence under one schema is where the convergence candidate lives.

the fortune instead

wealth
filler: a fortune / a kopeck
German and Russian decline the body image and price the thing in money. Real tongues opting out is the divergence that keeps the body-group finding honest.
Act II · the lineage

Descent, theft, and arrival

Every carrier, mapped. Gold lines are descent: a single lineage, many witnesses, one testimony. Dashed rose lines are borrowings, marked and kept, because a borrowed echo is still an echo. Teal rings stand alone: tongues that arrived on their own.

anchor cognate descent borrowed, marked independent arrival descent borrowing
Act III · the measurement

How surprised should we be?

8 tongues sounds like 8 witnesses. It is not. Families inherit, neighbours copy, and the instrument's first honest act is to count again. The count that matters is lineages, not languages; Echo's signed scorer asks one question: how many independent lineages is this, really?

surprisal = −log P(recurrence | Neff),   Neff = 1TΣ−11
Tier B · naïve
8
Every tongue counted as independent. Σ = I. An upper bound, and an honest lie.
Tier C · families collapsed
3
One voice per family block: Germanic, Italic/Romance, Slavic.
Tier C‑plus · topology
awaiting O3
Glottolog topology Σ, ridged. The store is data‑claude's build; no number is shown before the machine computes it.
the body as the price
3 of 6
six tongues, three arrivals: the quartet collapses to one; English limbs and the Dutch rib stand alone
the fortune instead
2 of 2
two tongues, two arrivals: different coins, separate routes, no shared image
tongues carrying the image independent arrivals
The Romance eye-quartet takes one credit, not four: identical schema, identical filler, one family, held as shared inheritance at roughly 60 to 65 confidence pending a single Latin or medieval source. The French 'coûter un bras' variant is flagged a probable modern English calque and takes nothing. Marked, never hidden.
Honest label. Curated by ekkko and annotated by vocabulary-claude 2026-06-09. The Romance shared-source hypothesis is held at 60 by the curator and 65 by the annotator and is not yet documented to a single source; the quartet's edges draw that hypothesis, not a proven transmission. The Dutch and Russian entries carry the lowest confidences in the set (65) and the French skin/arm variants live in the French entry's note rather than as separate records in this payload. countable structure, not computed Echo scores. Still owed before anything here leaves provisional:
  • the Romance eye idiom's single-source hypothesis WEAKENED at verification (fleet 2026-06-10, conf ~65): no Latin or medieval phrasal source for cost-an-eye was found in reachable sources; classical Latin carries an adjacent eyes-as-dearness topos (oculitus, Plautus via Nonius; Catullus) but not the cost idiom. The quartet stays cog on intra-Romance uniformity, with the common ancestor now likelier medieval-Romance than Latin; a Romance-philology pass is owed
  • dated first attestations: English arm-and-a-leg (mid-20th c?), French 'coûter un bras' (calque test)
  • native-speaker pass on every foreign entry
  • the parked function-taxonomy decision (F13 COMPLAIN/LAMENT) for the complaining force
Act IV · the lineages, drawn

Who told whom

Each tree is one lineage: one testimony, however many witnesses carry it. Gold branches are descent within a family; rose dashed branches are marked borrowings. The rings that stand alone below are the arrivals: nobody told them.

rooted in French · 4 witnesses, one testimony
Custar os olhos da cara. To cost the eyes of the face.PortugueseCostare un occhio della testa. To cost an eye of the head.ItalianCostar un ojo de la cara. To cost an eye of the face.SpanishÇa coûte les yeux de la tête. It costs the eyes of your head.French
lineages of one: the independent arrivals
EnglishDutchGermanRussian

A curated gathering in the spirit of Echo: grouped by the image each tongue reaches for, not by the words, with each saying's lineage named honestly. Where one tongue copied another it is marked, not hidden. Transliterations are approximate guides to sound. Per-entry curator confidences are shown with each saying; everything is provisional until the owed checks clear.

gathered and instrumented by ECHO · the instrument for measuring synchronicities · all the gatherings