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The ledger taught the poem to code-switch
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Macaronic poetry — verse that switches between English, French, and Latin mid-line — flourishes in late medieval England and is usually read as learned play or preaching technique. This conjecture ties it to a duller, stronger cause: trilingual bookkeeping. The clerks who kept accounts and drafted writs switched languages within single documents as a daily professional habit, and macaronic verse is that habit set to meter — which is why it should appear in the books such men owned, alongside their accounts, memoranda, and formularies, rather than in aristocratic literary anthologies. Code-switching was an occupational skill before it was an aesthetic. If this holds, the social home of macaronic lyric is the counting house, and its chronology should track the documented trilingualism of English administration rather than any literary fashion.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In the Digital Index of Middle English Verse, the share of macaronic items whose carrier manuscripts also contain documentary, legal, or account material will be at least twice the corresponding share for monolingual English lyrics of the same period; primary clause: that twofold carrier-profile gap. Secondary: macaronic items per decade will peak in the half-century of maximal trilingual record-keeping (c. 1350-1400) and decline as English monolingualizes administration.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: DIMEV language and manuscript fields, cross-referenced with the Index of Middle English Prose fascicules for carrier-manuscript contents.
In the kill-dataset registry:
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Blind fresh claude-fable-5 subagent (max effort), single-Write discipline, 2026-07-09. W07, first wave of the operator-directed medieval-European block (W07-W10).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched macaronic verse and trilingual clerical/business writing. Schendl and Wright explicitly connect literary code-switching with mixed-language business writing and accounts, anticipating the mechanism, but the DIMEV carrier-manuscript profile comparison is un-run.
Predictions
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