Tocharian A never signs a receipt

Claim (verbatim)

The two Tocharian languages had two different lives. Tocharian B, at Kucha, did everything a monastery town needs: liturgy and literature, but also accounts, caravan passes, letters, graffiti. Tocharian A survives — on the standard census — in religious and literary use alone, and its manuscripts take other people's study-glosses in Old Uyghur. The claim: by the era of the surviving manuscripts, Tocharian A was a curated cloister medium, a language of texts rather than of business, so the paperwork of daily life should be missing from its corpus not by accident of excavation (the find-spots overlap) but by the sociolinguistics of a dying prestige language. Prediction: in the catalogued corpus of CEToM, non-literary documents — accounts, caravan passes, letters, monastic administrative records — will constitute at least 10% of Tocharian B texts but under 2% of Tocharian A texts, and this asymmetry will hold within the Turfan-region finds alone, where both languages are represented (primary clause: the non-literary share contrast at the stated thresholds; the verdict follows it). Kill: CEToM, A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts (cetom.univie.ac.at), whose catalogue records language, find-spot and text type per fragment, with Sieg and Siegling's Tocharische Sprachreste as the print base.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the catalogued corpus of CEToM, non-literary documents — accounts, caravan passes, letters, monastic administrative records — will constitute at least 10% of Tocharian B texts but under 2% of Tocharian A texts, and this asymmetry will hold within the Turfan-region finds alone, where both languages are represented (primary clause: the non-literary share contrast at the stated thresholds; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: CEToM, A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts (cetom.univie.ac.at), whose catalogue records language, find-spot and text type per fragment, with Sieg and Siegling's Tocharische Sprachreste as the print base.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The census fact is long published: secular documents — accounts, caravan passes, letters, graffiti — are in Tocharian B, while Tocharian A survives in religious-literary use, the basis of the old 'dead church language' debate; Ching's paper on a handful of Tocharian A secular fragments treats their very existence as the noteworthy exception, and CEToM's text-type catalogue encodes the classification. The stated thresholds re-derive a published asymmetry.

• Ching Chao-jung, 'Fragments of secular documents in Tocharian A' (c. 2018)
• CEToM: A Comprehensive Edition of Tocharian Manuscripts (cetom.univie.ac.at), text-type catalogue
• G.-J. Pinault, Chrestomathie tokharienne: textes et grammaire (Peeters, 2008)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.