A nation's address book, read twice

Claim (verbatim)

Sāmoa's constitutional order was carried as recitation: the faʻalupega, the ceremonial address that every village and district must be greeted by, naming its honoured titles in their standing order — a memorized political registry maintained by the orators, because getting it wrong before an assembled fono is a public offence. This registry was fixed twice, independently, by instruments with different masters: Augustin Krämer took it down village by village in the 1890s for Die Samoa-Inseln (1902–03; English translation 1994), and the Malua mission press issued the orthodox handbook O le Tusi Faʻalupega o Samoa in successive twentieth-century editions. Two full snapshots of one living memorized corpus, roughly half a century apart, yield something the study of oral tradition almost never has: a measured drift rate. And the mechanism of drift is not forgetting but politics — faʻalupega move when titles split, villages quarrel and precedence is re-litigated, which is why the colonial order built a Land and Titles Court (1903) to absorb exactly those disputes. The registry should therefore show high verbatim stability overall, with its changes concentrated where the court's docket points — a signature separating maintained memory from decaying memory, measurable line by line. Prediction: comparing each village's faʻalupega in Krämer against the corresponding entry in the mid-century Tusi Faʻalupega, at least two thirds of villages will retain their opening honorific formulas substantively unchanged, and among villages whose entries do change, villages with recorded Land and Titles Court disputes over their leading titles will be over-represented by at least a factor of two relative to undisputed villages (primary clause: the two-thirds substantive-retention floor; the verdict follows it). Kill: Krämer, Die Samoa-Inseln vol. 1 (1902; trans. Verhaaren, University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1994) collated entry by entry with O le Tusi Faʻalupega o Samoa (Malua Printing Press editions), with the Land and Titles Court records at Mulinuʻu for the dispute clause.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: comparing each village's faʻalupega in Krämer against the corresponding entry in the mid-century Tusi Faʻalupega, at least two thirds of villages will retain their opening honorific formulas substantively unchanged, and among villages whose entries do change, villages with recorded Land and Titles Court disputes over their leading titles will be over-represented by at least a factor of two relative to undisputed villages (primary clause: the two-thirds substantive-retention floor; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Krämer, Die Samoa-Inseln vol. 1 (1902; trans. Verhaaren, University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1994) collated entry by entry with O le Tusi Faʻalupega o Samoa (Malua Printing Press editions), with the Land and Titles Court records at Mulinuʻu for the dispute clause.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Two full snapshots of the Samoan faʻalupega exist — Kramer's village-by-village record (Die Samoa-Inseln, 1902; trans. 1994) and the Malua press Tusi Faʻalupega — and the political mechanism of drift through title disputes absorbed by the Land and Titles Court is standard in the fa'amatai literature (Meleisea, 1987). But no entry-by-entry collation of the two editions measuring a verbatim-retention rate was located, still less the paired test that ties changed entries to the court's docket at twice the undisputed rate; the drift rate the conjecture wants is un-computed. Materials in print, arithmetic un-run. Adjacent.

• Augustin Kramer, Die Samoa-Inseln, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1902; trans. Theodore Verhaaren, University of Hawaii Press, 1994)
• O le Tusi Faʻalupega o Samoa (Malua Printing Press editions)
• Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa (Institute of Pacific Studies, USP, 1987)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.