A language kept alive by its footnotes

Claim (verbatim)

Khwarezmian, the Eastern Iranian language of the Khwarazm oasis on the lower Oxus, is one of the best-attested-yet-least-surviving languages of Inner Asia — a paradox the sources resolve. Its early record is thin (coin legends, ossuary and document scraps in an Aramaic-derived script), and then, extraordinarily, its largest body of evidence comes after Khwarazm's Islamisation, embedded inside Arabic-script books that were not about Khwarezmian at all: the interlinear Khwarezmian of copies of al-Zamakhshari's Arabic lexicon Muqaddimat al-adab, and the Khwarezmian sentences and legal terms quoted to gloss Hanafi law in works of the Qunya tradition. A living language survives chiefly as the glossing apparatus of texts in another language. The mechanism is a substrate-under-prestige filter: once Arabic and Persian became the languages of religion and record, Khwarezmian stopped generating its own books but persisted as the spoken tongue a jurist or lexicographer had to translate into, so it was written down precisely and only where it served comprehension of a prestige text — in the margins, between the lines, in the example sentence. The corpus is therefore parasitic by construction: no Khwarezmian work, only Khwarezmian in service of Arabic ones. Prediction: inventorying all known Khwarezmian textual attestations by host context, the majority of the recoverable Khwarezmian lexicon and sentence material will come from glosses and quotations embedded in Arabic-script works (led by the Muqaddimat al-adab glosses and the legal-gloss tradition), and no free-standing literary work composed in Khwarezmian will be among the witnesses (primary clause: the majority-of-lexicon-from-embedded-glosses result together with the absence of any free-standing Khwarezmian literary text; discovery of such a work falsifies it). Kill: Johannes Benzing, Chwaresmischer Wortindex (1983) and his edition of the Muqaddimat al-adab Khwarezmian glosses, with D. N. MacKenzie's Khwarezmian studies and the Qunyat al-munya legal-gloss materials as the juristic channel.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: inventorying all known Khwarezmian textual attestations by host context, the majority of the recoverable Khwarezmian lexicon and sentence material will come from glosses and quotations embedded in Arabic-script works (led by the Muqaddimat al-adab glosses and the legal-gloss tradition), and no free-standing literary work composed in Khwarezmian will be among the witnesses (primary clause: the majority-of-lexicon-from-embedded-glosses result together with the absence of any free-standing Khwarezmian literary text; discovery of such a work falsifies it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Johannes Benzing, Chwaresmischer Wortindex (1983) and his edition of the Muqaddimat al-adab Khwarezmian glosses, with D. N. MacKenzie's Khwarezmian studies and the Qunyat al-munya legal-gloss materials as the juristic channel.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

That Khwarezmian survives chiefly as the glossing apparatus of Arabic-script books - the interlinear Khwarezmian of the Muqaddimat al-adab and the Khwarezmian sentences and legal terms of the Qunya tradition - and that no free-standing literary work in Khwarezmian is among the witnesses, is the defining, stated fact of the field. Benzing's Chwaresmischer Wortindex is built from precisely those embedded glosses and MacKenzie's studies from the juristic quotations, so the primary clause (majority of lexicon from embedded glosses, no free-standing literary text) is guaranteed by where the published lexicon actually comes from. The answer is in print.

• Johannes Benzing, Chwaresmischer Wortindex (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983)
• D. N. MacKenzie, The Khwarezmian Element in the Qunyat al-munya (London: SOAS, University of London, 1990)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.