AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Commoners curse longer
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Claim (verbatim)
Old Burmese donative inscriptions of the Pagan period — the vernacular corpus that opens around the quadrilingual Myazedi inscription of 1113 — close with paired speech-acts: a blessing over those who sustain the gift and a curse over those who despoil it. These clauses are the legal armature of a merit economy, and imprecation is enforcement of last resort: a king's dedication is guarded by the king's officers, a widow's by Avici hell alone. Curse elaboration should therefore vary inversely with the donor's earthly power — supernatural sanction substituting for the state where the state is not the donor's to command. Prediction: coding the dated Pagan-era donative corpus for donor rank (royal, official, monastic, untitled commoner) and imprecation extent, mean curse length in clauses for commoner donations will exceed that of royal donations by at least 50%, and the share of donations carrying any curse will run at least 20 percentage points higher among commoners than among royal donors (primary clause: the 50% mean-length excess; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built): a donor-rank by imprecation table assembled from the standard editions of the Pagan corpus — Luce and Pe Maung Tin's Inscriptions of Burma (portfolios I-V, 1933-1956) and U Nyein Maung's She-haung Myanma Kyauksa-mya (Ancient Burmese Inscriptions, vols 1-5).
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: coding the dated Pagan-era donative corpus for donor rank (royal, official, monastic, untitled commoner) and imprecation extent, mean curse length in clauses for commoner donations will exceed that of royal donations by at least 50%, and the share of donations carrying any curse will run at least 20 percentage points higher among commoners than among royal donors (primary clause: the 50% mean-length excess; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill (not yet built): a donor-rank by imprecation table assembled from the standard editions of the Pagan corpus — Luce and Pe Maung Tin's Inscriptions of Burma (portfolios I-V, 1933-1956) and U Nyein Maung's She-haung Myanma Kyauksa-mya (Ancient Burmese Inscriptions, vols 1-5).
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.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation, claude-fable-5, 2026-07-16, breadth wave: under-represented cultures & places (Southeast Asia + Central/Inner Asia), produced from model knowledge; grounded in real works/inscriptions/corpora; no fabricated citations.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The paired blessing-curse formulae of Pagan donative inscriptions are a recognized feature of the corpus since the early scholarship, and the donative record is well edited and surveyed; but no study correlating imprecation extent or incidence with donor rank was located.
- G.H. Luce & Pe Maung Tin, Inscriptions of Burma, portfolios I-V (Oxford University Press, 1933-1956)
- T. Frasch, 'Myanmar Epigraphy: Current State and Future Tasks', in D. Perret (ed.), Writing for Eternity: A Survey of Epigraphy in Southeast Asia (EFEO, 2018)
Predictions
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