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 あ ('A') on top. Just now I happened to randomly cut the deck, twice, and the characters に ('NI') and よ ('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 known) the probability is 1 in (48 x 48), or 2304 to 1..? I don't know how 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 is 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 from left to right, and the other, right to left -- a tad unusual(?) in late October... I may be stretching it, but together their paths
described an X -- for another 'NO'.
