Two nets in one river

Claim (verbatim)

The pre-conquest Nahua song art survives through two nets dipped in the same river: the Cantares Mexicanos (Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico), with some ninety songs, and the Romances de los senores de la Nueva Espana (Benson Collection, Austin), with some sixty — two independent colonial transcription projects drawing on a living repertoire within decades of each other. Two independent draws from one population is the textbook condition for estimating the population: the overlap between the manuscripts measures the repertoire both were sampling. If the shared songs are few, the hoard was vast and the two manuscripts are flotsam; if the overlap is heavy, the sixteenth-century repertoire had already shrunk to a canon small enough to be sampled twice. Every ruler and named cuicani credited with songs in this literature then becomes countable loss. Prediction: songs shared between the two manuscripts, as concorded in Bierhorst's editions, will number under a quarter of the Romances' contents, and the Lincoln-Petersen estimate over the two collections will put the circulating repertoire at no fewer than 250 songs — most of the estimated repertoire appearing in neither manuscript (primary clause: the under-25% overlap share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the song-level concordances in John Bierhorst's twin editions — Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford, 1985) and Ballads of the Lords of New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2009) — an afternoon's count and one closed-form estimate.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: songs shared between the two manuscripts, as concorded in Bierhorst's editions, will number under a quarter of the Romances' contents, and the Lincoln-Petersen estimate over the two collections will put the circulating repertoire at no fewer than 250 songs — most of the estimated repertoire appearing in neither manuscript (primary clause: the under-25% overlap share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the song-level concordances in John Bierhorst's twin editions — Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford, 1985) and Ballads of the Lords of New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2009) — an afternoon's count and one closed-form estimate.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The song-overlap between the two manuscripts is published knowledge: Karttunen and Lockhart analyzed the variant pairs across the Cantares and Romances in 1980, and Bierhorst's twin editions concord the shared songs item by item. Counting the overlap re-derives a published concordance; only the Lincoln-Petersen repertoire estimate is new, and it is subordinate to the already-run overlap count.

• F. Karttunen & J. Lockhart, 'La estructura de la poesia nahuatl vista por sus variantes', Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 14 (1980)
• J. Bierhorst, Ballads of the Lords of New Spain: The Codex Romances de los Senores de la Nueva Espana (University of Texas Press, 2009)
• J. Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford University Press, 1985)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.