The script that survives as epitaph

Status: Already answered

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

The Khitan small script (created c. 925 according to the Liaoshi, and formally abolished by Jin decree in the early 1190s) is known today almost wholly from elite funerary stone, even though the Liao demonstrably wrote books in it. The claim: this is a survivorship law for suppressed court scripts — paper and silk rot or are pulped, the successor state's chancery stops copying, but aristocratic epitaphs lie buried beyond the reach of both decay and decree. The epitaph monoculture is therefore a property of the archive, not of Khitan writing, and it should keep reproducing itself as the corpus grows — the recent surfacing of a single large-script codex in St Petersburg (Nova N 176) marking the rare exception that a manuscript survival must be. Prediction: in a running census of published Khitan small-script texts, memorial and funerary inscriptions will constitute at least 75% of items and over 90% of total running graphs, and of the next twenty small-script texts published after this conjecture's registration at least fifteen will be funerary (primary clause: the current-census 75% item share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the text inventories in Kane's The Kitan Language and Script (Brill, 2009), updated with Wu Yingzhe and Janhunen's New Materials on the Khitan Small Script (2010) and subsequent epitaph publications.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in a running census of published Khitan small-script texts, memorial and funerary inscriptions will constitute at least 75% of items and over 90% of total running graphs, and of the next twenty small-script texts published after this conjecture's registration at least fifteen will be funerary (primary clause: the current-census 75% item share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the text inventories in Kane's The Kitan Language and Script (Brill, 2009), updated with Wu Yingzhe and Janhunen's New Materials on the Khitan Small Script (2010) and subsequent epitaph publications.

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

already answered in the literature

The inventory result is published: roughly seventy Khitan monuments are known, mostly epitaphs and eulogies buried in the tombs of the Liao nobility, as catalogued in Kane's handbook and extended by Wu and Janhunen's critical editions. The 75%-plus funerary share re-states the published census; only the prospective next-twenty-texts clause is genuinely new, and it is subordinate to the census claim.

D. Kane, The Kitan Language and Script (Brill, 2009)
Wu Yingzhe & J. Janhunen, New Materials on the Khitan Small Script: A Critical Edition of Xiao Dilu and Yelu Xiangwen (Global Oriental, 2010)

Predictions

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