The decreed script stays on stone

Claim (verbatim)

Kublai Khan decreed the Phags-pa script (1269) as the State Script for all documents of the empire; the Uighur-Mongolian script it was meant to supersede kept the letters, the ledgers and the literature — down to the Ilkhanid chancery letters that reached Paris and Rome in Uighur script. A script adopted by decree but not by habit should carry a media signature: dominance in genres where compliance was enforced and visible — imperial edicts on stone, seals, paiza, currency — and near-absence from self-motivated writing. The Phags-pa corpus is thus a natural experiment in how far imperial fiat can reach into a writing culture. Prediction: classifying the items in Tumurtogoo's twin corpora, at least 70% of the Phags-pa corpus will be edicts, seals, paiza, coin or banknote legends and other state-issued media, with private letters at or near zero, while the Uighur-Mongolian-script corpus of the same centuries will be majority letters, administrative documents and literary-religious manuscripts (primary clause: the 70% state-media share in Phags-pa; the verdict follows it). Kill: Tumurtogoo's Mongolian Monuments in Phags-pa Script (2010) and Mongolian Monuments in Uighur-Mongolian Script (2006) (Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica), with Poppe's The Mongolian Monuments in hPags-pa Script (1957).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: classifying the items in Tumurtogoo's twin corpora, at least 70% of the Phags-pa corpus will be edicts, seals, paiza, coin or banknote legends and other state-issued media, with private letters at or near zero, while the Uighur-Mongolian-script corpus of the same centuries will be majority letters, administrative documents and literary-religious manuscripts (primary clause: the 70% state-media share in Phags-pa; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Tumurtogoo's Mongolian Monuments in Phags-pa Script (2010) and Mongolian Monuments in Uighur-Mongolian Script (2006) (Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica), with Poppe's The Mongolian Monuments in hPags-pa Script (1957).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The corpus characterization is published: surviving Phags-pa Mongolian consists of imperial edicts and decrees, paiza, seals, banknotes and coins — state-issued media — while the Uighur script kept letters, documents and literature, and the script never displaced its rival despite repeated prohibition edicts; Poppe's and Tumurtogoo's corpora classify the items genre by genre. The 70% state-media share re-states the published census.

• N. Poppe, The Mongolian Monuments in hP'ags-pa Script (2nd ed., tr. J.R. Krueger, Harrassowitz, 1957)
• D. Tumurtogoo (ed.), Mongolian Monuments in 'Phags-pa Script: Introduction, Transliteration, Transcription and Bibliography (Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2010)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.