Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Intriguing Incident

MAYBE SOMEONE IS TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING -- IN KOREAN-WRITTEN-IN-JAPANESE

Lately I've been making an effort to memorize the Japanese syllabary (my Japanese-fluent parents never taught me... they reserved Japanese for themselves as a kind of secret code^ -- but I got them back by taking Esperanto lessons^^) and this morning I finished making a set of Hiragana character flashcards.  I had them stacked in order, with the character ('A') on top.  Just now I happened to randomly cut the deck, twice, and the characters ('NI') and ('YO') came up in succession.  It so happens these three syllables form the Korean phrase 'Aniyo' (아니요), which is a polite 'No'.

There are 48 of these characters (just the basic ones;  there's a whole bunch of additional characters formed by modifying or combining the basic 48).  I know absolutely nothing about statistics, but since the probability of any particular character coming up is 1 in 48, I guess for two specific characters (since the first one was already there) the probability is 1 in (48 x 48), or 2304 to 1..?  I don't know how, or if, the order in which they turn up figures into it (after all,  あよに / 아요니 is gibberish in both languages), but even without that part the likelihood of あによ / 아니요 / NO turning up purely by chance looks fairly impressively small.

Interesting.  Is this the answer to an unasked question I've been mulling over in my unconscious?  Or will I soon be facing a Yes/No choice of some kind?^

Edit:  I just came back from a short walk during lunch break.  A dragonfly and a hummingbird streaked past me, one right after the other -- a tad unusual in late October..?  And one went left, the other went right -- I may be stretching it, but together their paths described an X, like this(click) -- for another 'NO'.

No comments:

Post a Comment