Luso

Following on from the last post about not noticing romance language roots in English, I came across another example. I was reading “Everything Is Predictable” by Tom Chivers, which is about Bayesian Statistics. In the chapter I’ve just read he talks about the difference between ways of not knowing something. Take these two examples:

Firstly, you have a coin and you toss it in the air but it hasn’t landed yet.

Secondly, your friend has tossed a coin, caught it but hasn’t yet told you the result.

I’m the first situation, your uncertainty comes from the fact that it’s really impossible to know how the coin will land. Whereas in the second case, the coin has landed so there is a real, knowable answer, you just don’t know it yet.

The first is called Aleatoric Uncertainty and the second Epistemological Uncertainty.

OK, well if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to read the book. I’m only mentioning it here because Aleatoric is a word we never really use outside of these specialised contexts. In fact, I’m pretty sure if never heard it before in my 56 years of speaking English, but in Portuguese of course aleatório is just the word for “random” and it’s pretty common.

Of course it come back to latin. As you will remember from your roman history (OK, OK, i admit, I only know it from Astérix books) Alea Jacta Est means “The die is cast” so Aleatório gives an idea of having thrown the dice and awaiting the results.