The script whose first book burned

Claim (verbatim)

The Vai syllabary of Liberia is one of the very few scripts whose birth is documented in real time: S. W. Koelle, who investigated it in 1849 (Narrative of an Expedition into the Vy Country), recorded that it had been invented about 1833 by Momolu Duwalu Bukele and associates and was already in working use for letters, records, and books — and he transmitted the tradition that an original body of Bukele's own writings had been destroyed when war burned the town that held them, the corpus perishing almost as fast as it was made (the modern authority is Konrad Tuchscherer). The mechanism is the classic vulnerability of a young indigenous script: no institutional archive, no redundancy, production on perishable materials in a war-prone region, so the nineteenth-century Vai manuscript corpus — genuinely produced in quantity — survives only as a thin scatter in the collections Koelle and later visitors carried out, plus fragments in situ. The prediction is a survival cliff and an export bias. Prediction: of securely nineteenth-century Vai-script manuscripts extant today, the majority will sit in European and North American collections gathered by outside collectors rather than in situ in Liberia, and securely datable pre-1850 Vai manuscripts will number in the low single digits or fewer (primary clause: a majority of the nineteenth-century corpus survives in externally gathered collections; the verdict follows it). Kill: not yet built as a census — assemble it from the Vai manuscript holdings documented by Konrad Tuchscherer and from Koelle's collected materials and grammar (1849, 1854), with the SOAS and German mission collections, treating the 'burned first book' as attested testimony rather than an extant object.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: of securely nineteenth-century Vai-script manuscripts extant today, the majority will sit in European and North American collections gathered by outside collectors rather than in situ in Liberia, and securely datable pre-1850 Vai manuscripts will number in the low single digits or fewer (primary clause: a majority of the nineteenth-century corpus survives in externally gathered collections; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: not yet built as a census — assemble it from the Vai manuscript holdings documented by Konrad Tuchscherer and from Koelle's collected materials and grammar (1849, 1854), with the SOAS and German mission collections, treating the 'burned first book' as attested testimony rather than an extant object.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Koelle's 1849 investigation records the c.1833 invention of the Vai syllabary and the tradition of the burned first books, and Tuchscherer is the modern authority on the corpus; the earliest known Vai manuscript is indeed held externally (Houghton Library, Harvard). But the primary clause is a provenance census — that a majority of the extant nineteenth-century corpus sits in externally gathered European and North American collections — and the conjecture states this 'is not yet built as a census.' The survival cliff and export bias are documented case by case; the majority-share tally is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.