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The decree of the new tongue is a stratigraphic layer
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)
In the early ninth century the Tibetan empire standardized Buddhist translation vocabulary by decree, issuing an authorized dictionary of equivalents. Join a philologist's observation to an archivist's need: a vocabulary imposed at a datable moment is a stratigraphic layer, so undated Tibetan translations should be datable to before or after the reform on terminology alone, with genuinely mixed vocabularies marking discrete revision events rather than gradual drift. Decrees create step-functions where fashions create slopes, and an empire enforcing terms through its scriptoria produces the step. If this holds, thousands of undated Dunhuang Tibetan texts inherit dates for free, and the reform's real enforcement radius — which genres and scriptoria obeyed, which ignored it — becomes measurable for the first time.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (verdict-bearing): undated Dunhuang Tibetan translations partition into two discrete terminological strata, pre-standard versus standardized equivalents, with under 15% of texts showing substantial mixture. Secondary clause: the received canonical transmission shows under 5% residual pre-standard terminology, confirming descent from post-reform states.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
OTDO Dunhuang translation corpus scored against the standardized equivalent-lists, with rKTs canonical collation data for the secondary clause.
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
Generated blind in a single Write by a fresh instance with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was inline in the launching prompt.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Dating Tibetan translations by pre- vs post-Mahavyutpatti (814 CE) terminology is an established qualitative practice — e.g. PT1257 is analysed precisely as pre-standardization vocabulary — but the corpus-wide two-strata partition with a mixture bound has never been run over the undated Dunhuang translation corpus.
Sources cited by the triage
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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