The mountain cache dissents

Claim (verbatim)

Everything we read of Old Javanese literature passed, on the standard picture, through one funnel: Bali's living recopying tradition, which transmitted what Balinese religion and taste had use for and silently dropped the rest. But Java kept one dissenting witness — the Merapi-Merbabu collection, roughly four hundred palm-leaf manuscripts from hermitage scriptoria on the slopes of the two Central Javanese volcanoes, copied in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in the archaic aksara buda and often on gebang leaf, a carrier Bali did not use, and brought down to the Batavia society's library in the mid-nineteenth century; the corpus is now in the National Library of Indonesia and catalogued by Setyawati, Wiryamartana and van der Molen (2002). This is a fossil deposit, not a treadmill: a non-Balinese sample of the Old Javanese textual world, frozen when the mountain communities died out. If Bali was a selective filter rather than a faithful pipe, the cache must contain a measurable stratum of texts with no Balinese transmission whatever — and for texts the two channels share, the mountain copies should be the older physical witnesses, as Wiryamartana's use of Merapi-Merbabu manuscripts for the Arjunawiwaha already suggests. Prediction: cross-tabulating the distinct Old Javanese texts of the Merapi-Merbabu corpus in the 2002 catalogue against Balinese transmission as registered in Pigeaud's and Hinzler's catalogues and the Kirtya registers, at least one fifth of the Merapi-Merbabu titles will prove to have zero Balinese witnesses — unica of a dead Javanese channel — and among texts attested in both channels, the oldest Merapi-Merbabu witness will be older than the oldest dated Balinese witness in over three quarters of cases (primary clause: the one-fifth unica share; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built): a channel cross-table assembled from Kartika Setyawati, Kuntara Wiryamartana and Willem van der Molen, Katalog Naskah Merapi-Merbabu Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (2002), against Pigeaud's Literature of Java and Hinzler's Leiden catalogue.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: cross-tabulating the distinct Old Javanese texts of the Merapi-Merbabu corpus in the 2002 catalogue against Balinese transmission as registered in Pigeaud's and Hinzler's catalogues and the Kirtya registers, at least one fifth of the Merapi-Merbabu titles will prove to have zero Balinese witnesses — unica of a dead Javanese channel — and among texts attested in both channels, the oldest Merapi-Merbabu witness will be older than the oldest dated Balinese witness in over three quarters of cases (primary clause: the one-fifth unica share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built): a channel cross-table assembled from Kartika Setyawati, Kuntara Wiryamartana and Willem van der Molen, Katalog Naskah Merapi-Merbabu Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (2002), against Pigeaud's Literature of Java and Hinzler's Leiden catalogue.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The Merapi-Merbabu corpus is fully catalogued (Setyawati, Wiryamartana and van der Molen 2002) and its scholarly value rests precisely on its holding Old Javanese texts outside the Balinese channel, a point Wiryamartana's Arjunawiwaha work already exploits. But the primary clause is a cross-channel census - at least one fifth of Merapi-Merbabu titles with zero Balinese witnesses - and that title-by-title cross-tabulation against Pigeaud, Hinzler and the Kirtya registers has not been run. The catalogue supplies the materials; the one-fifth unica share is the conjecture's own un-run arithmetic. Adjacent.

• Kartika Setyawati, I. Kuntara Wiryamartana & Willem van der Molen, Katalog Naskah Merapi-Merbabu Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia (Yogyakarta: Universitas Sanata Dharma, 2002)
• I. Kuntara Wiryamartana, Arjunawiwaha: Transformasi Teks Jawa Kuna Lewat Tanggapan dan Penciptaan di Lingkungan Sastra Jawa (Yogyakarta: Duta Wacana University Press, 1990)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.