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Three tablets copied through the mouth
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“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Three rongorongo tablets carry long stretches of one and the same text: the Great Santiago tablet (H, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago) and the Great and Small St Petersburg tablets (P and Q, Kunstkamera) — the parallel Boris Kudrjavtsev noticed as a student in wartime Leningrad (published posthumously, 1949), worked through by Butinov and Knorozov and by Barthel, and traced glyph by glyph in Paul Horley's comparative studies (Rapa Nui Journal). The triple is the closest thing to a stemma the tradition left, and it should betray its copying channel. A visual copyist confuses what looks alike and skips at arbitrary points; a scribe re-inscribing a memorized chant holds the spoken sequence fixed while the graphic packaging floats — the same base signs turn up differently fused, appended and spaced — because on Rapa Nui the tablet was a score for recitation and the exemplar was the mouth, not the wood. The claim: H, P and Q are recitation-anchored re-inscriptions, not eye-copies of a wooden exemplar. Prediction: in a sign-level alignment of the shared H/P/Q text, at least 70% of non-identical aligned positions will differ only allographically under Barthel's coding — same base-sign number with divergent ligature, appendage or hand variant — while substitutions of graphically unrelated signs stay under 10%, and insertions or deletions fall at boundaries of repeated formulas rather than mid-formula (primary clause: the 70% allographic share of mismatches; the verdict follows it). Kill: Barthel's 1958 transcriptions of texts H, P and Q in the CEIPP digitization, checked against Paul Horley's published comparative tracings of the three tablets (Rapa Nui Journal); the alignment and the mismatch classification are a mechanical computation over the coded lines.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in a sign-level alignment of the shared H/P/Q text, at least 70% of non-identical aligned positions will differ only allographically under Barthel's coding — same base-sign number with divergent ligature, appendage or hand variant — while substitutions of graphically unrelated signs stay under 10%, and insertions or deletions fall at boundaries of repeated formulas rather than mid-formula (primary clause: the 70% allographic share of mismatches; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: Barthel's 1958 transcriptions of texts H, P and Q in the CEIPP digitization, checked against Paul Horley's published comparative tracings of the three tablets (Rapa Nui Journal); the alignment and the mismatch classification are a mechanical computation over the coded lines.
Browse the registry: Digitized texts →
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Oceania & the Pacific; Cross-period Tagged by Claude (Opus 4.8)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 1200 CE – 1850 CE Rongorongo corpus (tablets H, P, Q), Rapa Nui settlement era (c.1200 CE) through the tradition's loss (1862-63 raids); capped at 1850. Kudrjavtsev/Barthel/Horley studies are the instrument. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Philology, editions & stemmatics; The oral-written interface stemma-like comparison testing visual vs oral copying channel for an undeciphered script Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies
- no listed page covers undeciphered sign systems Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim the prediction classifies mismatches in a three-witness parallel text to diagnose how the tablets were re-inscribed Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Assigned
- Channel dissociation the registered test classifies the mismatch spectrum by type, at least 70 percent of non-identical aligned positions allographic under Barthel coding, graphically unrelated substitutions under 10 percent, and insertions or deletions falling at formula boundaries, diagnosing the channel from the kind of error; the stemmatics link is dropped because no descent tree is built, only the mismatch classification Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Digitized texts; Published editions Barthel's transcriptions of H, P and Q in the CEIPP digitization with Horley's published comparative tracings are the aligned data Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation instance of claude-fable-5, 2026-07-16, small breadth wave: Oceania non-scribal knowledge systems plus rongorongo, grounded in real objects, chants and charts including the evidence of their loss; no fabricated citations.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The H/P/Q parallel is the classic tool for identifying allographs, ligatures and graphic variants (Kudrjavtsev's discovery; Horley's tracings; Davletshin's substitution-method study), so the allographic character of much inter-tablet variation is qualitatively established. But the copying-channel question — recitation-anchored re-inscription versus eye-copy — has not been posed as a quantitative mismatch-classification test with an allographic-share threshold.
Sources cited by the triage
- B.G. Kudrjavtsev, 'Pis'mennost' ostrova Paskhi', Sbornik Muzeya Antropologii i Etnografii 11 (1949), 175-221
- A. Davletshin, 'Allographs, Graphic Variants and Iconic Formulae in the Kohau Rongorongo Script of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)', Journal of the Polynesian Society 126.1 (2017), 61-92
- P. Horley, 'Structural analysis of rongorongo inscriptions', Rapa Nui Journal 21 (2007)
Predictions
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