The copyist's numeral accent

Claim (verbatim)

Sexagesimal digits were written in Arabic abjad letter-numerals, in Hindu-Arabic ciphers, and in various Latin conventions, and each system has its own characteristic confusions — which letter melts into which when a diacritic drops, which cipher flips into which under a tired pen. The surprising connection is that a translated table's error spectrum preserves the confusion classes of the lost EXEMPLAR's numeral system, not the surviving copy's: a Latin table copied from an abjad exemplar carries abjad-shaped errors even though every visible digit is Latin. The mechanism is simple — the error was made once, in the exemplar's script, and then faithfully carried across the script boundary by a translator who transmitted values, not shapes. If this holds, the numeral system of a lost exemplar becomes recoverable statistically from its descendants, giving table stemmatics a tool that words cannot supply.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Statistical test: in digit-level DISHAS transcriptions, tables independently documented as Arabic-to-Latin translations will exhibit error pairs belonging to abjad confusion classes (values differing by canonical abjad letter-neighbour offsets or single-diacritic letter pairs) at a rate at least twice that found in tables composed natively in Latin, with the two confusion-class distributions distinguishable by chi-squared test at p<0.01. Primary clause: the twofold enrichment; the distributional test is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

DISHAS digit-level table transcriptions and variant registers, stratified by documented translation history.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The exact connection is published: van Dalen & Pedersen's re-edition of al-Battānī explicitly demonstrates that most scribal errors in the Castilian and Latin manuscripts derive from their Arabic originals, i.e. abjad-shaped confusions carried across the script boundary, and abjad confusion classes are catalogued in the table-editing literature. The conjecture's chi-squared packaging is new but the specific claim/result — exemplar numeral-system errors recoverable from translated descendants — is established editorial method.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.