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The key was cut from common signs

Cross-period Dated c. 1000 CE – 1600 CE Americas

Status: No prior located

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).

This is a conjecture imagined by a language model — drawn from its trained weights and held to falsifiability, novelty, and plausibility, not to any one method: it may join two or more fields, or none. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The burner made the key. Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan — itself surviving only as an abridged copy in the Real Academia de la Historia, recovered by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862 — records the so-called Landa alphabet: some twenty-seven signs elicited from a Maya literatus, most plausibly Gaspar Antonio Chi, by asking him to write the names of Spanish letters. Knorozov's 1952 reading of these signs as consonant-vowel syllables opened the decipherment. But an elicitation session samples a scribe's reflexes, not the syllabary's grid: under dictation a working scribe reaches for his most-practiced equipment. The Landa alphabet should therefore be a frequency-weighted sample of the script — which is why so few signs could unlock so much, and a measure of how much the decipherment of a burned literature still owes to one afternoon of one informant's habits. Prediction: matching Landa's securely identified syllabic signs to the standard grid as tabulated in Kettunen and Helmke's open workbook, at least three quarters will fall in the top half of syllable-sign token frequency in the four codices as recorded in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, with the median Landa sign in the top quartile (primary clause: the three-quarters-in-top-half share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database codical records for sign-token frequencies, joined to the Landa sign identifications in the syllabary chart of Kettunen and Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs (freely downloadable workbook); the computation is a rank join and two percentile counts.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: matching Landa's securely identified syllabic signs to the standard grid as tabulated in Kettunen and Helmke's open workbook, at least three quarters will fall in the top half of syllable-sign token frequency in the four codices as recorded in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, with the median Landa sign in the top quartile (primary clause: the three-quarters-in-top-half share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database codical records for sign-token frequencies, joined to the Landa sign identifications in the syllabary chart of Kettunen and Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs (freely downloadable workbook); the computation is a rank join and two percentile counts.

Browse the registry: Mesoamerican codices →

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.

How this item is catalogued

Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.

Place & era tags — Assigned: Americas; Cross-period Tagged by Claude (Opus 4.8)
Dating — Phenomenon: Dated c. 1000 CE – 1600 CE Maya syllabic writing in the four Postclassic codices (c.11th-16th c.) and Landa's 1566 elicitation of Gaspar Antonio Chi's 'alphabet'; Maya Hieroglyphic Database/Kettunen-Helmke workbook are the instrument. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
Subject — Assigned: Philology, editions & stemmatics decipherment-elicitation sampling bias in the Landa alphabet Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies: No listed Atlas subject page is squarely about Maya script decipherment. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
Claim level — Assigned: Record claim The prediction is that a sixteenth-century elicited sign list is frequency-weighted against sign usage in the surviving codices: a property of how that record was produced, not of modern practice. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
Method — Reviewed — none applies: A rank join and two percentile counts; frequency weighting is tested by position in a ranking, not by a fitted distribution. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
Evidence source — Assigned: Mesoamerican codices; Published editions Kill test joins codical sign-token frequencies from the Maya Hieroglyphic Database to the Landa sign identifications in Kettunen and Helmke's workbook syllabary. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
Research stage — Idea — no test designed

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

Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-16, breadth wave: Sub-Saharan Africa + pre-Columbian Americas, weighted by inferred production and above all by loss; every item grounded in real works, authors, codices, catalogues, and testimonia, including the real evidence of destruction, dispersal, and undecipherability; no fabricated citations.

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-17)

Knorozov's decipherment coupled Landa's signs with frequency-based positional statistics over the codices, and the Landa alphabet's internal structure and elicitation context have been studied, but a dated search located no prior test of whether Landa's elicited signs are a frequency-weighted sample of the codical syllabary (the rank-join against sign-token frequencies). Citations are the closest context works, not priors.

Sources cited by the triage

Y.V. Knorozov, 'Drevnyaya pis'mennost' Tsentral'noy Ameriki', Sovetskaya Etnografiya 3 (1952)
G. Stuart, 'Glyph Drawings from Landa's Relacion: A Caveat to the Epigrapher' (1988)

Predictions

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