An Echo workup · one truism, in full

The gift horse,
in many tongues

“Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.”

The motif beneath the words: when given a gift, do not appraise it.

Eight tongues warn you away from the horse's teeth, and it looks for all the world like Europe agreeing. It is not. This workup is the counter-specimen: one Latin sentence radiating outward for sixteen centuries, and the instrument's job is to watch the apparent wonder collapse to a single arrival.

verdict: single lineage
Act I · the decomposition

Inspecting the interior

Vocabulary keys every entry identically: S1 CONTAINMENT primary (looking into the mouth-cavity to inspect the interior) with S28 SURFACE secondary (judging worth by visible signs). Low schema-salience: this motif rides its function and a constant filler, not a rich image. The gift itself is a one-way transfer, recorded as the semantic frame, not a schema. Function F02 ADVISE primary, F04 REBUKE secondary.

The level of this echo
The tongues agree at every level: schema, domain, and the exact filler, horse and teeth and gift, never varying. Total agreement is not deep convergence; it is inheritance. When the filler never moves across eight tongues, the echo is a pedigree, and the level of this echo is single lineage.

the horse, the teeth, the gift

animal appraisal + the gift frame
filler: horse / mouth, teeth / gift
One image everywhere: judging a horse's age by its teeth, which one must not do to a gift. The filler never varies, and that constancy is the fingerprint of single lineage, not convergence.
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: Italic/Romance, Germanic, 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 horse, the teeth, the gift
1 of 8
eight tongues, one arrival: the cleanest single-lineage star in the corpus
tongues carrying the image independent arrivals
Nothing here earns independence credit beyond the single Latin arrival. Seven carriers, one source: the whole spread is one inheritance, drawn as a star around Jerome's sentence. Marked, never hidden.
Honest label. Curated by ekkko 2026-06-09; annotated by vocabulary-claude the same day, schema-identical across all entries. Jerome locus FLEET-VERIFIED 2026-06-10 against the Migne scan (PL 26, col. 439, prologue; verdict resolves-borrowed, skeptic-corrected conf 87): Jerome attests a proverb he calls already common, so he anchors the literary chain without authoring the saying. The star topology from the Latin is the lineage hypothesis for the literary chain, not a documented transmission map; the radiation paths are undated. countable structure, not computed Echo scores. Still owed before anything here leaves provisional:
  • earlier-than-Jerome attestations of the folk proverb he quotes (his own wording marks it pre-existing; the oral prehistory is open)
  • dated first attestations per language to confirm radiation from the Latin
  • the genuine open question: a non-Indo-European 'don't appraise a gift' under a DIFFERENT image would be the real convergence finding; none is curated and none is coded absent
  • native-speaker pass on every foreign entry
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 Latin · 8 witnesses, one testimony
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Don't appraise a gift.EnglishEinem geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul. One does not look a gifted nag in the mouth.GermanA caval donato non si guarda in bocca. One does not look a gifted horse in the mouth.ItalianA caballo regalado no le mires el diente. A gifted horse, don't look at its tooth.SpanishA cavalo dado não se olha o dente. A given horse, one does not look at the tooth.PortugueseÀ cheval donné on ne regarde pas les dents. A given horse, one doesn't look at the teeth.FrenchДарёному коню в зубы не смотрят. One doesn't look a gift horse in the teeth.RussianNoli equi dentes inspicere donati. Do not inspect the teeth of a gifted horse.Latin

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