An Echo workup · one truism, in full

Two birds, one stone,
in many tongues

“Kill two birds with one stone.”

The motif beneath the words: one act, two prizes.

Thirteen tongues prize the act that wins twice. They throw stones, loose arrows, bait pigeons with a bean, swat flies, and roast two joints at one fire: wildly different images for one shape of thought. This is the flagship: a genuine convergence claim that survives only if three look-alikes are correctly collapsed, and one of them is the project's acceptance test.

verdict: convergence
Act I · the decomposition

The dual-target spine

Vocabulary's keying, ratified: every entry shares S22 COLLECTION (two targets) plus the same primary function (F05 OBSERVE), and most add S2 SOURCE-PATH-GOAL (the projectile). The bait entry swaps to S13 ATTRACTION primary with S1 CONTAINMENT; the fire entry to S18 TRANSFORMATION. The expressive admiration in canonical use awaits the parked F14 PRAISE/ADMIRE decision.

The level of this echo
The tongues agree on the spine, one act achieving two prizes, and then scatter on everything else: stone, arrow, bean, swat, fire; birds, eagles, flies, pigeons, joints. Divergent fillers under a shared spine across unrelated families is what genuine convergence looks like. And the one place the filler does NOT vary, stone and birds identical from London to Tokyo to Seoul, is exactly where the wonder is fake: zero variance at maximal distance is a loan wearing convergence's clothes. The level of this echo is the spine, and the exceptions prove the instrument.

the projectile

hunt / strike
filler: stone + birds / arrow + eagles / arrow + targets / swat + flies / shot + birds / stone + hits
One missile, two prizes. Most of the motif lives here, and so do all three of its traps: the identical stone-and-birds filler recurring across unrelated families is not wonder, it is the fingerprint of a loan.

the bean and the pigeons

trap / lure
filler: bean + pigeons
Italian alone baits instead of striking: the bean lures, the trap closes. A different mechanism entirely, agreeing with the others only on the prize.

two joints at one fire

cooking / heat
filler: fire + two roasts
Polish cooks where the others hunt: one heat source, two transformations. No path, no strike, same double win.
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?

13 tongues sounds like 13 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
13
Every tongue counted as independent. Σ = I. An upper bound, and an honest lie.
Tier C · families collapsed
9
One voice per family block: Germanic, Italic/Romance, Semitic, Iranian, Turkic, Sinitic, Japonic, Koreanic, 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 projectile
3 of 11 (+3 gated)
eleven tongues, three counted arrivals (the English chain grown to five tongues, the Chinese arrow, the Germanic flies), plus three candidates at the gates: the Persian arrow's image is verified classical and independent, its modern sense still gated
the bean and the pigeons
1 of 1
one tongue, one arrival: Italy's lure stands alone
two joints at one fire
1 of 1
one tongue, one arrival: Poland's fire stands alone
tongues carrying the image independent arrivals candidates at the gates
The stone-and-birds web (Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and now Arabic around the English anchor) is one chain, not five arrivals: the Japanese link is the project's flagship acceptance test, now documented as a Meiji-era loan, and the Arabic link resolved the same way against a verified negative of 6.68 million classical pages. The German-Dutch flies count once. Three carriers (Persian, Turkish, French) wait at gates: the Persian image verified independently classical, gated now only on its modern sense. Unknowns named as unknowns, and two former unknowns counted out loud. Marked, never hidden.
Honest label. Curated by ekkko 2026-06-07 and annotated by vocabulary-claude 2026-06-09; the schema-based regrouping (strike/bait/fire) replaced the curator's original geographic sub-shapes after vocabulary caught that the 'fishing/netting' sub-shape contained no fishing instances: a curation error, owned and fixed in this payload. The three dating gates (Arabic vs Hobbes 1656, the Japanese Meiji loan date, Persian pre-contact) are all held below 55 confidence and nothing gated is coded independent. countable structure, not computed Echo scores. Still owed before anything here leaves provisional:
  • two attestation gates still fully open: Arabic stone-sparrows vs 1656, and the isseki-nicho Meiji loan date (both gate-research runs died at a spend limit, queued for re-run)
  • the Persian SENSE question (the image verified classical and independent, fleet 2026-06-10; what remains is whether the modern positive polarity is native drift or a Qajar-era sense-loan): first positive-sense attestation, Dehkhoda's Amsal o Hekam, classical prose corpus, and the Kalim Kashani 17th-c. positive hunting-feat variant (found unverified, conf 70) all owed
  • real net/fish instances, if any exist, would form a genuine fourth cluster (collection + containment, no projectile); none curated yet and none coded absent
  • native-speaker pass on every foreign entry; Arabic and Persian forms especially
  • the parked function-taxonomy decision (F14 PRAISE/ADMIRE with F13) for the admiring 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 English · 5 witnesses, one testimony
Matar dos pájaros de un tiro. Kill two birds with one shot.Spanish일석이조 One stone, two birds.Korean一石二鳥 One stone, two birds.Japaneseضرب عصفورين بحجر واحد Strike two sparrows with one stone.ArabicKill two birds with one stone. Achieve two goals with one act.English
rooted in German · 2 witnesses, one testimony
Twee vliegen in één klap. Two flies in one stroke.DutchZwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen. Hit two flies with one swat.German
lineages of one: the independent arrivals
MandarinItalianPolish
waiting at the gates: counted as unknowns
FrenchPersianTurkish

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