The archive chose the language's canon

Claim (verbatim)

Apabhraṃśa was a full literary language — third of the classical triad the poeticians list beside Sanskrit and Prakrit — and its own tradition names its classics: Svayambhūdeva's ninth-century metrical treatise, the Svayambhūcchandas, teaches the metres by quoting the masters, above all Caturmukha, founder of the Apabhraṃśa epic manner, and the Kṛṣṇa-poet Govinda, and the later epic poets still salute Caturmukha as the ancestor. Not one work of Caturmukha or Govinda survives. What does survive of Apabhraṃśa literature — Svayambhū's own Paümacariu, Puṣpadanta's Mahāpurāṇa, and the rest recovered by twentieth-century editors — survives because it was Jain, held in the temple bhandars of Gujarat and Rajasthan; even the celebrated exception, the Sandeśarāsaka of the Muslim poet Abdul Rahman, reached print through Jain custody. The extant canon of the language is therefore not the language's canon: it is the slice a single archiving community happened to own, while the tradition's own most-praised founders sit in the unarchived remainder. Survival selected by custodian, not by fame — and the treatise that quotes the founders is the register against which to prove it. Prediction: resolving the poets quoted as exemplary authorities in the Svayambhūcchandas against the manuscript record, Caturmukha and Govinda will show zero surviving works, while of the complete pre-1400 Apabhraṃśa literary works extant today at least 90% will have their earliest witnesses in Jain collections (primary clause: the zero-and-90% conjunction; a Caturmukha or Govinda codex surviving outside Jain transmission kills it outright). Kill: H. D. Velankar's edition of the Svayambhūcchandas (Rajasthan Puratana Granthamala, Jodhpur, 1962), his Jinaratnakośa (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1944) for the Jain manuscript registry, H. C. Bhayani's Paümacariu edition and Apabhraṃśa fragment studies (Singhi Jain Series, 1953-1960), and the New Catalogus Catalogorum for the null.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: resolving the poets quoted as exemplary authorities in the Svayambhūcchandas against the manuscript record, Caturmukha and Govinda will show zero surviving works, while of the complete pre-1400 Apabhraṃśa literary works extant today at least 90% will have their earliest witnesses in Jain collections (primary clause: the zero-and-90% conjunction; a Caturmukha or Govinda codex surviving outside Jain transmission kills it outright).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: H. D. Velankar's edition of the Svayambhūcchandas (Rajasthan Puratana Granthamala, Jodhpur, 1962), his Jinaratnakośa (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1944) for the Jain manuscript registry, H. C. Bhayani's Paümacariu edition and Apabhraṃśa fragment studies (Singhi Jain Series, 1953-1960), and the New Catalogus Catalogorum for the null.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That Caturmukha and Govinda survive only in quotations and homages, and that extant Apabhramsa literature is overwhelmingly Jain and bhandar-preserved, are standard statements; but the custody census over a pinned pre-1400 work-list has not been run, and its 90% earliest-witness clause could genuinely surprise, since Buddhist Apabhramsa doha transmission ran through Nepalese rather than Jain channels.

• K.K. Handiqui, Yasastilaka and Indian Culture (Sholapur, 1949), on Caturmukha as known only from quotations and references
• E. De Clercq, The Apabhramsa of Svayambhudeva's Paumacariu (Mumbai, 2009)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.