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The quire betrays the refugee
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)
Beneath script, which a scribe can consciously adapt, lie codicological habits almost nobody thinks to change: how many leaves make a quire, how flesh and hair sides of parchment face each other, where the pricking goes. These conventions differed by region — quaternions in one zone, quinions in another — and SfarData records them for thousands of dated books. The conjecture is that displaced scribes update their script toward local norms faster than their quire structure, so post-expulsion manuscripts show a diagnostic dissonance: locally acceptable hands built on foreign skeletons, because deep craft habit learned in apprenticeship is the slowest layer of scribal identity to assimilate. If this holds, quire structure becomes a detector for first-generation refugee scribes even where colophons are silent about origins, and assimilation itself becomes measurable layer by layer.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause: among dated post-1391 and post-1492 manuscripts copied in Italy and the Ottoman zone by scribes of Iberian origin, the proportion retaining Iberian quire composition while already showing local script features exceeds the proportion showing the reverse dissonance (local quiring with unaltered Iberian script) by at least two to one. The verdict follows this asymmetry clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
SfarData, which pairs quire composition and parchment arrangement with script type, date, and locality for dated manuscripts.
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 in a single blind Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is a relaunch after the prior W19 attempt was stopped mid-run.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Regional quire-composition norms are a core published SfarData result and immigrant scribes' retention of native practices is noted, but the layered-assimilation asymmetry test (local script over foreign quiring versus the reverse) is un-run.
Sources cited by the triage
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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