Campa stops writing Sanskrit first

Claim (verbatim)

The two great Indic epigraphic cultures of the Southeast Asian mainland made opposite late choices. Campa — the region's earliest vernacular writer, with the Dong Yen Chau inscription (c. fourth century) standing as the oldest attested text in any Austronesian language — let public Sanskrit thin out early in favour of Cham; Angkor kept Sanskrit prasasti at full ceremony through the reign of Jayavarman VII and after. If vernacularization was a polity-level choice rather than a single Indic-world clock, the two dated corpora should show Campa's turn leading Angkor's by generations. Prediction: computing per-half-century language shares among dated inscriptions, the last half-century in which Sanskrit texts make up at least half of dated Campa epigraphs will precede the corresponding half-century for Cambodia by at least 150 years, and after 1100 CE the Cham-language share of dated Campa inscriptions will exceed 75% while Cambodia's Sanskrit share stays above 25% through 1250 (primary clause: the 150-year lead; the verdict follows it). Kill: the dated-inscription inventory of the Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campa (Griffiths et al., the EFEO digital corpus continuing Coedes' C-numbered inventory; Golzio's 2004 one-volume compilation) set against the dated inventory in Coedes' Inscriptions du Cambodge I-VIII.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: computing per-half-century language shares among dated inscriptions, the last half-century in which Sanskrit texts make up at least half of dated Campa epigraphs will precede the corresponding half-century for Cambodia by at least 150 years, and after 1100 CE the Cham-language share of dated Campa inscriptions will exceed 75% while Cambodia's Sanskrit share stays above 25% through 1250 (primary clause: the 150-year lead; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the dated-inscription inventory of the Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campa (Griffiths et al., the EFEO digital corpus continuing Coedes' C-numbered inventory; Golzio's 2004 one-volume compilation) set against the dated inventory in Coedes' Inscriptions du Cambodge I-VIII.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The timing contrast is known qualitatively: Cham vernacular epigraphy is the region's earliest (Dong Yen Chau) and public Sanskrit thins at Campa from around the eleventh century, while Angkor kept Sanskrit prasasti to 1327 — facts stated across the corpus literature and thematized in Pollock's vernacularization account; but per-half-century language shares across the two dated corpora, with crossing points, have not been computed.

• A. Griffiths et al. (eds), The Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campa (EFEO digital corpus, continuing Coedes' C-inventory)
• K.-H. Golzio, Inscriptions of Campa, Based on the Editions and Translations of Abel Bergaigne, Etienne Aymonier, Louis Finot... (Shaker Verlag, 2004)
• S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (University of California Press, 2006)

Predictions

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