An Echo workup · one truism, in full

The ball in your court,
in many tongues

“The ball is in your court.”

The motif beneath the words: the next move now rests with you.

Three tongues put the ball in your zone, and almost none of it echoes. This is the weakest motif in the batch and the record says so plainly: a mid-20th-century tennis phrase translated around Europe within living memory, curated so the corpus knows what a non-echo looks like. Not everything that recurs is a synchronicity, and an instrument that cannot say so is not an instrument. The one spark worth keeping: Spanish moves the ball onto the roof, and no one is yet sure why.

verdict: single lineage
Act I · the decomposition

The object in your zone

Vocabulary keys the court, camp, and field forms identically: S1 CONTAINMENT primary (the ball sits inside YOUR bounded zone) with S14 CYCLE secondary (turn-taking alternates). The curator's TURN/RESPONSIBILITY = OBJECT-IN-YOUR-ZONE reading decomposes to exactly that pair. The Spanish roof swaps the primary: S28 SURFACE (on top of), keeping S14, a real schema difference and not a filler variant. Function F02 ADVISE primary (it is now on you to act), F11 NEGOTIATE/MEDIATE secondary.

The level of this echo
Not everything echoes, and this motif is curated to say so. Three tongues agree at the schema, the domain, and very nearly the filler, because they share one twentieth-century source: agreement this recent and this uniform is a calque chain, not a convergence, and the level of this echo is single lineage, shallow and freshly dated. The one entry that moves, the Spanish roof, moves at the schema itself, and that swap is the single question this record keeps open. Everything else is a modern phrase that got translated around, and the instrument's job here is restraint.

the court, the camp, the field

sport / bounded playing zone
filler: court / camp / field
One image everywhere the chain reaches: the ball sits inside YOUR bounded zone, so the next play is yours. The zone renames itself (court, camp, field) but the image never moves, and a constant image on a mid-20th-century timeline reads as translation, not arrival.

the ball on your roof

rooftop / surface
filler: roof
Spanish alone puts the ball ON a roof, not IN a court: a genuine schema swap, containment traded for surface. Whether it is even the same sport metaphor is held at fifty, so it waits at the gate as the motif's one second look.
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. Slate dashed rings wait at a dating gate: unknowns counted as unknowns, never as wonder and never as loans.

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

How surprised should we be?

4 tongues sounds like 4 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
4
Every tongue counted as independent. Σ = I. An upper bound, and an honest lie.
Tier C · families collapsed
2
One voice per family block: Germanic, Italic/Romance.
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 court, the camp, the field
1 of 3
three tongues, one arrival: the English anchor and its two marked calques
the ball on your roof
0 of 1 (+1 gated)
one tongue, zero counted arrivals, one candidate at the gate: held at fifty on whether it is even the same metaphor
tongues carrying the image independent arrivals candidates at the gates
The French and German forms are marked calques of the English tennis phrase and collapse into a single arrival: three tongues, one source, drawn as a short chain. The Spanish roof takes no independence credit either way: it waits at a fifty-percent gate on whether it is even the same metaphor. Expected outcome at scoring: low surprisal after the relatedness and recency corrections, and that low score is the finding, not a failure. Marked, never hidden.
Honest label. Curated by ekkko 2026-06-09, graded weakest of the batch and shelve-first, and annotated by vocabulary-claude the same day; the annotation confirmed the triage at the schema level, not just the etymology level: court, camp, and field carry one schema, and the Spanish roof is a genuine schema swap. Per-entry confidences are the curator's pre-verification numbers. The Spanish accent (está) was restored from the source's plain romanization at confidence 98; all other forms are carried as given. Attestation dates are expected modern across the board and none is yet confirmed. Verdict note: the schema's verdict enum has no separate borrowed value; single lineage is the nearest one-source-transmission option, and the per-attestation borrow tags plus the level_call carry the precise borrowed-modern-calque reading. countable structure, not computed Echo scores. Still owed before anything here leaves provisional:
  • dated first attestations across the chain: expected modern (mid-20th century) for every form; confirm
  • the Spanish tejado question: same sport metaphor or a separate idiom, held at 50 by curator and annotator alike; corpus and native-speaker pass owed
  • native-speaker pass on every foreign entry
  • unlisted languages are not coded absent; the record claims nothing beyond the four curated forms
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 English · 3 witnesses, one testimony
La balle est dans ton camp. The ball is in your camp.FrenchDer Ball liegt bei dir / in deinem Feld. The ball lies with you / in your field.GermanThe ball is in your court. It is now your turn, your responsibility, to act.English
waiting at the gates: counted as unknowns
Spanish

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