The one Khotanese book

Claim (verbatim)

Khotanese, the Middle Iranian Saka language of the southern Silk Road kingdom of Khotan, has left a real corpus — but almost all of it is translation (Buddhist sutras rendered from Sanskrit) and documents (the kingdom's administrative paperwork). Original Khotanese literature, a Khotanese author composing a Khotanese book, is dominated by a single work, the Book of Zambasta, a large Mahayana verse compendium named after the patron who commissioned it; and that one original book survives in essentially one old, incomplete manuscript, missing chapters, its leaves scattered, edited by Ronald Emmerick in 1968. A whole literature's flagship original composition thus hangs on one damaged codex. The mechanism is the singleton trap of a peripheral literary language: translations ride the prestige of their well-copied source and the documents ride the state, but an original vernacular work has only its own small readership to keep it alive, so it survives, if at all, as a lone witness — and the number of Khotanese original works that left no witness at all is unknowable precisely because the class's one survivor barely made it. Prediction: across the entire Khotanese manuscript record, original Khotanese literary compositions (as opposed to translations and documents) will be outnumbered by translated and documentary texts by more than twenty to one in surviving folio count, and the Book of Zambasta will remain the only original Khotanese literary work of book length attested in more than a fragment (primary clause: the Zambasta singleton status among book-length originals; a second independently attested book-length original Khotanese composition falsifies it). Kill: Ronald E. Emmerick, The Book of Zambasta: A Khotanese Poem on Buddhism (1968), with his A Guide to the Literature of Khotan (2nd ed., 1992) as the corpus census and the Khotanese holdings in the IDP database.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: across the entire Khotanese manuscript record, original Khotanese literary compositions (as opposed to translations and documents) will be outnumbered by translated and documentary texts by more than twenty to one in surviving folio count, and the Book of Zambasta will remain the only original Khotanese literary work of book length attested in more than a fragment (primary clause: the Zambasta singleton status among book-length originals; a second independently attested book-length original Khotanese composition falsifies it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Ronald E. Emmerick, The Book of Zambasta: A Khotanese Poem on Buddhism (1968), with his A Guide to the Literature of Khotan (2nd ed., 1992) as the corpus census and the Khotanese holdings in the IDP database.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Emmerick's Guide to the Literature of Khotan is the corpus census, and it establishes the Book of Zambasta as the one original Khotanese literary composition of book length, standing against a record otherwise made of translations and administrative documents. The primary clause - Zambasta's singleton status among book-length originals - is thus already the stated finding of the standard survey, not an open question; only the exact folio-count ratio the prediction also names is left uncomputed. Here the famous singleton anchor and the census verdict coincide.

• Ronald E. Emmerick, The Book of Zambasta: A Khotanese Poem on Buddhism (London Oriental Series 21, Oxford University Press, 1968)
• Ronald E. Emmerick, A Guide to the Literature of Khotan, 2nd ed. (Studia Philologica Buddhica, Occasional Paper Series III, Tokyo, 1992)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.