Short lines carry the story

Claim (verbatim)

The kakawin poets imported dozens of Sanskrit quantitative metres into Old Javanese, but they ran the inventory as an economy, not a museum. Kakawin lived in sung recitation, and both performance and compositional cost tax long lines: a handful of manageable workhorse metres should carry the narrative freight, with the longest-line prestige metres reserved for marked stations — openings, set-piece descriptions, closures — in short virtuoso bursts. Metre choice, canto by canto, is thus a record of the tradition's cost accounting. Prediction: tabulating canto metres across four classical kakawins in standard editions (the Old Javanese Ramayana, Arjunawiwaha, Bhomantaka, Sutasoma), the ten most frequent metres will account for at least 60% of all cantos, and metres of nineteen or more syllables per line will run at most two consecutive cantos at a stretch while at least one metre under fifteen syllables runs four or more (primary clause: the top-ten concentration of at least 60%; the verdict follows it). Kill: the metre identifications in Zoetmulder's Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (1974) and the canto-by-canto metrical schemes printed in the editions — Kern's Ramayana (1900), Robson's Arjunawiwaha (2008), Teeuw and Robson's Bhomantaka: The Death of Bhoma (2005), Santoso's Sutasoma (1975).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: tabulating canto metres across four classical kakawins in standard editions (the Old Javanese Ramayana, Arjunawiwaha, Bhomantaka, Sutasoma), the ten most frequent metres will account for at least 60% of all cantos, and metres of nineteen or more syllables per line will run at most two consecutive cantos at a stretch while at least one metre under fifteen syllables runs four or more (primary clause: the top-ten concentration of at least 60%; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the metre identifications in Zoetmulder's Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (1974) and the canto-by-canto metrical schemes printed in the editions — Kern's Ramayana (1900), Robson's Arjunawiwaha (2008), Teeuw and Robson's Bhomantaka: The Death of Bhoma (2005), Santoso's Sutasoma (1975).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Zoetmulder's Kalangwan appendix inventories the roughly 200 kakawin metres and shows at a glance which were in widespread use, and canto-by-canto schemes are printed in the standard editions; but concentration statistics (top-ten share of cantos) and run-length constraints on long-line prestige metres have not been computed.

• P.J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (Nijhoff, 1974), appendix on kakawin metres
• Anandajoti Bhikkhu, 'Old Javanese Metres' (ancient-buddhist-texts.net), a re-presentation of Zoetmulder's metrical data

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.