Tetraphobia
[4] Chinese is a tonal language with a comparatively small inventory of permitted syllables, resulting in an exceptionally large number of homophone words.
Example: "94" could be interpreted as "certain death"[citation needed] The tetraphobia is not apparent for the military and government institutions of the People's Republic of China.
While in Mandarin-speaking regions in China, 14 and 74 are considered unluckier than the individual 4, because 14 (十四, pinyin: shí sì) sounds like "is dead" (是死, shì sǐ).
[6] In Hong Kong, some apartments such as Vista Paradiso and The Arch skip all the floors from 40 to 49, which is the entire 40s.
The number 49 is also considered unlucky, as its pronunciation is similar to the Japanese term shiku, meaning 'to suffer and die'.
Efforts to accommodate tetraphobia-related sensitivities have been seen in Canada, which has a significant population of Chinese descent.
[10][11] In the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, among others, numbers 40-49 are skipped for the same reasons they may be omitted in China.
[15] However, representatives from SaskTel requested that the new area code be 639 instead, to avoid the negative connotations of 4 in Asian cultures.
[17] A 2001 article by authors Phillips et al published in the British Medical Journal reported a study that looked at mortality statistics in the United States over a 25-year period.
The authors reported findings that on the fourth day of the month, Asian people were thirteen percent more likely to die of heart failure.
The hypothesis purportedly tested in the study was that psychological stress caused by belief in this superstition could indeed trigger deadly heart attacks and other fatal incidents.
[18] Subsequent efforts by other researchers have failed to replicate the findings reported by Phillips and collaborators.
[19] One such effort was by researchers who replicated the 2001 study's methods in a Hong Kong Chinese population which did not show evidence consistent with increased cardiac mortality on the 4th, 14th, or 24th days of the month.
[20] Another such effort was by Gary Smith, an economist with expertise in debunking improper use of data in statistical analyses.
Smith's reanalysis of the data did not find evidence to support the conclusions drawn in the 2001 study.
Furthermore, Smith's review of other scientific publications by Phillips identified inconsistencies in the 2001 study's methodology compared to the author's other published work, where the 2001 study was reported to include only a subset of cardiac deaths compared to work by Phillips on similar populations with similar definitions of cardiac mortality groups.
