An Echo workup · one truism, in full

Try, try again,
in many tongues

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.”

The motif beneath the words: after failure, try again.

Fourteen voices console the one who just failed, and most of them count: seven falls and eight risings, twelve broken webs and a thirteenth climb, ten axe strokes, twenty returns to the loom, a hundred breakings without a bend. Inside each bloc the echo is inheritance: a schoolbook rhyme crossing the Atlantic, a spider transplanted from Douglas to Bruce by Scott's pen, a four-character form carried from Japanese into Korean. Across blocs, Han and Song China, Japan, Korea, Turkey, France, Arabia, and the English schoolroom reach the same cycle through unrelated images and eras, which is what genuine convergence looks like pending the null model. The audit even caught the anchor's own origin story: the scan long cited for 1836 is the 1840 edition, and the English priority question stays contested on the record.

verdict: mixed
Act I · the decomposition

The counted attempt

Authored before vocabulary-claude's annotation pass (owed; the S/F-code keying is vocabulary's). The shared spine in plain terms: a cycle of attempt, failure, and renewed attempt, with failure tolerated rather than read as a verdict. The motif's signature surface habit is the counted-attempts schema, seven falls, twelve broken webs, ten strokes, twenty reworkings, a hundred breakings, dramatizing exactly how many failures are tolerable. The pragmatic frame is consolatory exhortation, strongly didactic and often child-directed, spoken by the encourager rather than the failer.

The level of this echo
The tongues agree on the cycle, fail and try again, and many even share the counting habit, then scatter on everything else: a falling body, a spider's web, an iron pestle, an axe and a tree, a loom, a bare rhyming refrain with no image at all. Divergent images under a shared spine across unrelated families is the convergence signal, pending the null model. And where the surface does NOT vary, the English rhyme crossing the Atlantic, the spider changing heroes inside Scottish historiography, the four-character form crossing from Japan into Korean, the echo is inheritance, not arrival. The level of this echo is the cycle, with single lineage doing the loud talking inside every bloc.

the bare refrain

song refrain / named persistence
filler: try, try again (no image)
Persistence named rather than pictured: the verb itself repeated as a song refrain, no concrete image at all. Both voices are one English schoolbook lineage, and that lineage's own origin date is the audit's one contested citation.

numbered falls, the body rises

the falling, rising body
filler: seven falls + eight risings / a hundred breakings, no bending / a child's falls
A counted series of falls or breakings answered by endurance; the persisting body itself is the image. Japan and Korea share one form by borrowing; Han China bends without breaking rather than rising after falls; Turkey watches a child learn to walk.

the watched small creature

exemplum legend: defeated leader + persistent creature
filler: spider + web + 13th attempt / ant + grain + counted failures
A defeated leader in hiding watches a small creature fail many counted times and finally succeed, and takes it as an omen to try once more. Inside Scotland the tale is a literary transplant, Douglas to Bruce; the Central Asian ant waits at an adjudication gate.

wearing the obstacle down

attrition by repeated strokes
filler: iron pestle + needle / ten axe strokes + tree
Persistence as erosion: the resistant object yields to sheer repetition. No falls and no retry event, failure dissolved into continuous effort; two unrelated tongues reach the image separately.

twenty times on the loom

craft revision
filler: loom + twenty reworkings + polish
Failure framed as imperfect drafts: return the workpiece to the loom again and again until it is right. France's own counted-attempts schema, in the workshop rather than on the ground.

the rhymed effort maxim

imageless maxim
filler: jadda / wajada (strive / find)
No image at all: striving guarantees finding, the persuasion carried by morphological rhyme. The motif's edge case, effort-guarantees-success rather than retry-after-failure, kept on the record with its caveat.

the egg that will walk (boundary marker)

gradualness, a flagged near-neighbor
filler: egg + its own feet
Not retry after failure but slow incremental progress: included only as the boundary marker showing where persistence-after-failure shades into patience. Takes no credit anywhere.
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?

12 tongues sounds like 12 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
12
Every tongue counted as independent. Σ = I. An upper bound, and an honest lie.
Tier C · families collapsed
8
One voice per family block: Germanic, Japonic, Koreanic, Sinitic, Turkic, Iranian/Turkic (unverified), Italic/Romance, Semitic.
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 bare refrain
1 of 2
two tongues, one arrival: a schoolbook rhyme crossing the Atlantic, its priority date contested at check
numbered falls, the body rises
3 of 4
four tongues, three arrivals: the Japanese-Korean pair collapses to one by borrowing; Han China bends without breaking; Turkey arrives alone with the child's falls
the watched small creature
1 of 3 (+1 gated)
three voices, one counted arrival: the Scottish legend counts once across its Douglas-to-Bruce transplant; the Timur ant waits at the gate
wearing the obstacle down
2 of 2
two tongues, two arrivals: Song China grinds, Korea chops; the Korean axe's possible contact with English little-strokes is an owed adjudication
twenty times on the loom
1 of 1
one tongue, one arrival: Boileau's loom stands alone
the rhymed effort maxim
1 of 1
one tongue, one arrival, carried with its shape caveat: effort-guarantees-success at the motif's edge
the egg that will walk (boundary marker)
0 of 1 (+1 gated)
one voice, no arrival: the gradualness near-neighbor is a boundary marker, counted nowhere
tongues carrying the image independent arrivals candidates at the gates
Three chains collapse before anything is counted: Hickson's rhyme to Palmer's manual is one English arrival, not two (and which printing came first is contested on the record); the Douglas spider to Scott's Bruce is one Scottish legend, a literary transplant counted once; Japanese 七転八起 to Korean 칠전팔기 is an orthographic borrowing, one arrival wearing two tongues. Two voices take nothing: the Timur ant waits at the migratory-legend gate, and the Amharic egg is a flagged near-neighbor belonging to a different motif. Marked, never hidden.
Honest label. Fleet-curated gathering, anti-confabulation-checked 2026-06-10: 9 attestations spot-checked against live sources, no fabricated phrases or sources found, corrected gathering confidence 82. Four citation defects repaired into this payload exactly as flagged. (1) MISDATED EDITION, the most serious: the archive.org scan cited behind 'London 1836' (sing00hick) is the 1840 London edition per archive.org metadata, so it cannot support Hickson-preceding-Palmer; the US attestation drops 85 to 60 and is marked CONTESTED, the UK attestation 80 to 70 (the rhyme is certainly Hickson's; the 1836 dating is the weak link). (2) UNVERIFIED SUPPORT: the 'Google Books 1836 edition record' cited in the gathering could not be verified; the 1836-first claim traces to Wikipedia and its mirrors, while the quote-reference tradition gives Palmer 1840 as first written record, and BookBrowse, cited as corroboration, actually states Palmer-first. (3) DEAD URL: the Turkish NTV link 404ed; the proverb and TDK definition were re-verified at the corrected URL and in Turkish Wiktionary. (4) MIS-POINTED URL: the Kotobank entry cited does not carry the Tsubouchi Shoyo 1885-86 citation, which is real but lives at the sibling four-character entry; the pointer was repaired. Trivial: the Cai Yong stele normalized to the source's orthography (太尉橋公碑). Verbatim-confirmed at check: both MOE idiom source passages, the Hume of Godscroft spider passage including '12 several times' and 'the 13 tyme', the Korean Wiktionary borrowing line, the Boileau lines, the Turkish proverb, the Korean axe proverb, and both Kotobank entries. Carried could-not-verifies: Scott's exact 1828 passage (not fetched from a primary edition), the Timur ant's native wording and any pre-modern source, the Arabic maxim's classical-era first attestation, any pre-Meiji Japanese attestation; all Hickson and Hume of Godscroft wordings come from secondary transcriptions, which caps those groups at or below 85. countable structure, not computed Echo scores. Still owed before anything here leaves provisional:
  • Null-model pass: how often unrelated proverb corpora yield a persistence-after-failure form by chance (data-claude scorer)
  • Surprisal score in bits for each cross-bloc pair, especially Japanese fall/rise vs Turkish fall/rise and Bruce spider vs Timur ant
  • Look-elsewhere correction across the whole motif corpus before any wonder claim
  • Provenance adjudication: the Korean chiljeonpalgi borrowing chain (Wiktionary etymology partly boilerplate); the Timur-ant vs Bruce-spider migratory-legend question; whether the Korean axe-tree image is contact-related to English little-strokes-fell-great-oaks
  • Primary-source verification: an actual 1836 edition of Hickson's The Singing Master, eyeballed (the archive.org scan the gathering cited proved at check to be the 1840 edition, leaving the Hickson-vs-Palmer priority CONTESTED); the Hume of Godscroft 1643 page image; Scott's verbatim 1828 passage
  • Pre-Meiji dating for Japanese 七転び八起き: the earliest dated literary use reached is 1885-86, the Daruma and okiagari-koboshi links suggest Edo currency but remain unproven, and native coinage is held near confidence 70
  • Arabic man jadda wajada classical-era first attestation (only modern usage and one academic article verified)
  • The dropped and the absent, kept on the record: the Russian candidate (терпение и труд всё перетрут) was dropped after its Wiktionary page 404ed unverified; no sub-Saharan fall-and-recover persistence proverb was reached with real sourcing, and none is coded absent
  • License clearance: Wiktionary-derived wordings are CC-BY-SA, already flagged to legal-claude under the build gate; no corpus build until the backbone spec is signed
  • 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 English (Britain) · 2 witnesses, one testimony
'Tis a lesson you should heed, Try, try again. If at first you don't succeed, Try, try again. The same rhyme with the refrain shortened to the now-canonical 'Try, try again'.English (United States)'Tis a lesson you should heed: / Try, try, try again. / If at first you don't succeed, / Try, try, try again. Heed the lesson: after failure, try again.English (Britain)
rooted in Japanese · 2 witnesses, one testimony
칠전팔기 (七顚八起) Seven falls, eight risings: persevering despite repeated failures.Korean七転び八起き Fall seven times, get up eight: recover with determination after every failure.Japanese
rooted in Scots/English (Scotland) · 2 witnesses, one testimony
could not verify native wording (Scott's exact passage not fetched from a primary edition) Robert the Bruce, in hiding after defeat, watches a spider fail and then succeed in fixing its web, and resolves to fight on.English (Scotland)I spied a spider clymbing by his webb to the height of an trie and at 12 several times I perceived his web broke, and the spider fel to the ground. But the 13 tyme he attempted and clambe up the tree The spider fails twelve times and succeeds on the thirteenth; told of Sir James 'the Black' Douglas, not Bruce.Scots/English (Scotland)
lineages of one: the independent arrivals
ChineseTurkishChineseKoreanFrenchArabic
waiting at the gates: counted as unknowns
Persian/Turkic oral tradition (Central Asia)Amharic

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