brimstoneSalad wrote:You have some work to do on your understanding, then.
Let's see if we can reach of a consensus via discussing it.
brimstoneSalad wrote:The counterclaim that it's an illusion needs to be plausible, which it is not. That's not how waves work. In the very least I would expect a diagram to show how it actually works with waves when intuitively that makes no sense when visualizing line of sight.
Right. I think that the best response to the Flat-Earthers claiming that ships disappearing bottom first is caused by waves is something along the lines of: "
I assume you know basic trigonometry, try to calculate how high the waves would have to be hide a ship that's 5 km away from you. I'll give you a hint: they would have to be slightly higher... than your eye level. Not to mention the same thing obviously happens when there are no waves.".
But, even so, the burden of proof is on one claiming there is some weird illusion going on, to prove that such an illusion is at least possible. It's difficult to prove that sunrays appearing to converge is an illusion (rather than proving the Sun is close), but it's easy to prove that such an illusion is at least possible (for example, with railroads).
brimstoneSalad wrote:IF ships disappearing from the bottom were literally the only reason we suspected the Earth to be round, then challenges to that would surely be taken more seriously as they probably were in the era of that discovery.
Right. If ships were disappearing bottom first, but the same constellations were visible from all places on Earth, that would be difficult to explain.
brimstoneSalad wrote:Chance is the null hypothesis, so you have the burden of proof to show it's something else.
My friend, to me it seems like that k-r pattern in the river names is probably the only statistically significant pattern in the Croatian names of places.
Mainstream onomastics considers that s-r that repeats in the Croatian toponyms such as Sirmium (ancient name for Srijemska Mitrovica), Serota (ancient name for Virovitica), and Serapia (ancient name for Bednja) to have been the Illyrian word for "to flow", but I think that pattern is not statistically significant. The primary reason for assuming that pattern is not a coincidence appears to be the existence of the Indo-European root *ser meaning "to flow". Now, how they make that belief compatible with the belief that Illyrian is the direct ancestor of Albanian (where there was a very old sound change of Indo-European *s to 'gj', happening even before the satemization) is beyond me, but that's irrelevant here.
brimstoneSalad wrote:However, because you've selected river names specifically out of a grab bag of many hundreds or more of comparable noun categories, you need to do better on your P-value to make chance implausible.
Well, I used to think everybody would agree that the p-value of that k-r pattern is probably closer to 1/300 than to 1/17. However, my information theory professor Franjo Jović didn't agree with that. He told me that he thinks that the p-value is closer to 1/17 than to 1/300 because he thinks that not a lot of entropy in the Croatian language goes to morphology (I estimated the collison entropy of morphology to be at most 1.572 bits per pair of consonants, but I couldn't give a lower bound).
But even so, I don't think the exact numbers are that much relevant. Mainstream onomastics uses a methodology of which one of the basic principles is that the etymologies from languages we know a lot about (Croatian, Latin, Turkic, Celtic...) are more probable than the etymologies from languages we know little about (Illyrian...). And it's not obvious what the mathematical justification of that principle would be. Not only that, that methodology appears to be incompatible with the information theory. It gave the result that this k-r pattern in the Croatian river names is a coincidence (Mainstream onomastics claims that Karašica comes from Turkic "kara sub" meaning "black water", that Krapina comes from Germanic word for the carp fish, that Korana comes from the Celtic word *karr meaning "stone", that Kravarščica is named after the village Kravarsko rather than vice versa, that Krbavica is related to the archaic Croatian word "hrbat" meaning "mountain", and that "Krka" is the Illyrian for "oak tree" previously referring to some town rather than to the river.), while basic information theory says that such a pattern is unlikely to be due to chance (that the probability of such a pattern occurring by chance is somewhere between 1/300 and 1/17). The right thing to do is to throw away the mainstream methodology and start using some methodology that doesn't run right in the face of the information theory, right?
brimstoneSalad wrote:I will assume your explanations on your P-value in isolation is credible
Well, it's hard to tell. A forum.hr user called DarkDivider told me that my supposed Proto-Slavic form of the river name Karašica, *Kъrъrьsьja (from Illyrian *Kurrurrissia), is impossible because Proto-Slavic phonotactics didn't allow four syllables with yers to be consecutive. I asked him where he had read that, but he didn't answer me. Furthermore, as far as I understand it, mainstream onomastics is also proposing etymologies which imply Proto-Slavic forms with four yers. The town name Cavtat is widely thought to derive from the Latin phrase "(in) civitate", and the Proto-Slavic form was therefore *Kьvьtъtь. So, overall, I'd say it's credible.
brimstoneSalad wrote:It is also not hard to show with a small desktop model (like a large cardboard box with precise measurements) that the sun's rays are effectively parallel, which supports the basic premise required for the experiment.
Really? You can tell that way that the Sun is further away than around 5'000 kilometers, which would be the explanation of the Eratosthenes'es experiment if the Earth were flat?