The apprentice outgrows Bhatti

Claim (verbatim)

The Old Javanese Ramayana, the oldest surviving kakawin (c. ninth century), is a graded exercise in composing Sanskrit-style poetry in a new literary language: its true parent is not Valmiki but Bhatti's Ravanavadha (the Bhattikavya), itself a grammar-demonstration poem — a dependence established by Manomohan Ghosh in 1936 and worked through by Hooykaas. A poet writing his language's first mahakavya leans on the model while learning and walks free once fluent; apprenticeship is sequential, so dependence should decay along the poem's own length rather than sit in patches. The kakawin is thus a fossil of second-language poetic acquisition, and its correspondence profile against Bhatti should have the shape of a learning curve. Prediction: aligning the kakawin's sargas against the Bhattikavya via the published stanza-correspondence registers, matched stanzas per hundred kakawin stanzas will decline from the first quarter of the poem to the last, with the final quarter's match rate under one-third of the first quarter's (primary clause: the final-to-first-quarter ratio below one-third; the verdict follows it). Kill: Kern's 1900 edition of the Old Javanese Ramayana (public domain) read against a standard Bhattikavya edition, with the correspondence analysis in Hooykaas, The Old-Javanese Ramayana: An Exemplary Kakawin as to Form and Content (1958) and Ghosh's 1936 source study.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: aligning the kakawin's sargas against the Bhattikavya via the published stanza-correspondence registers, matched stanzas per hundred kakawin stanzas will decline from the first quarter of the poem to the last, with the final quarter's match rate under one-third of the first quarter's (primary clause: the final-to-first-quarter ratio below one-third; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Kern's 1900 edition of the Old Javanese Ramayana (public domain) read against a standard Bhattikavya edition, with the correspondence analysis in Hooykaas, The Old-Javanese Ramayana: An Exemplary Kakawin as to Form and Content (1958) and Ghosh's 1936 source study.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The correspondence profile along the poem has been mapped since Hooykaas: close adherence to the Bhattikavya only in the first part (about the first 65% of the work), thinning after sarga 13 and vanished from sarga 17 onward, with Khanna and Saran's 1993 revision arguing looser reuse resumes in sargas 19-24. The quarter-by-quarter ratio is arithmetic over an already-published decay profile.

• C. Hooykaas, The Old-Javanese Ramayana: An Exemplary Kakawin as to Form and Content (Amsterdam, 1958)
• V. Khanna & M. Saran, 'The Ramayana Kakawin: A Product of Sanskrit Scholarship and Independent Literary Genius', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 149 (1993)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.