Dead channels keep old books

Claim (verbatim)

Old Sundanese literature — the pre-Islamic verse and prose of West Java, with masterpieces like Bujangga Manik's travel poem and the 1518 Sanghyang Siksa Kandang Karesian — survives in one of the smallest corpora of any Southeast Asian literary language: a few dozen codices, chiefly the hermitage caches of the kabuyutan sanctuaries such as Ciburuy in Garut, plus a stray lontar that reached the Bodleian in the 1620s-30s. The conjecture is that this corpus's age structure is the diagnostic inverse of Bali's, and for a lawlike reason. A living recopying tradition continuously replaces old objects with young ones, so its corpus is huge and young; a tradition killed in mid-life — here by the Islamization of West Java in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which ended the scriptoria and made the script unreadable — stops producing young copies at death, so its corpus is tiny and old, a shelf of terminal originals with no copying tail. Sundanese literature should therefore present the paradox of being physically the oldest large group of Indonesian literary manuscripts precisely because its transmission died: fifteenth-to-seventeenth-century gebang and lontar with nothing after, every second text a sole witness, and a median object age centuries older than the median Balinese or Malay manuscript. Prediction: a full census of Old Sundanese manuscripts will count fewer than fifty codices worldwide, of which none was copied after 1700, at least half are sole witnesses of their texts, and the corpus's median physical age exceeds the median of catalogued Balinese lontar by more than two hundred years (primary clause: the zero-copies-after-1700 cutoff across a sub-fifty corpus; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built): a census table assembled from Noorduyn and Teeuw, Three Old Sundanese Poems (KITLV, 2006), Aditia Gunawan's codicological inventories of gebang manuscripts ('Nipah or Gebang?', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 171, 2015), the National Library of Indonesia's kropak holdings, and the Bodleian's Javanese-Sundanese manuscripts.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: a full census of Old Sundanese manuscripts will count fewer than fifty codices worldwide, of which none was copied after 1700, at least half are sole witnesses of their texts, and the corpus's median physical age exceeds the median of catalogued Balinese lontar by more than two hundred years (primary clause: the zero-copies-after-1700 cutoff across a sub-fifty corpus; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built): a census table assembled from Noorduyn and Teeuw, Three Old Sundanese Poems (KITLV, 2006), Aditia Gunawan's codicological inventories of gebang manuscripts ('Nipah or Gebang?', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 171, 2015), the National Library of Indonesia's kropak holdings, and the Bodleian's Javanese-Sundanese manuscripts.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The smallness and antiquity of the Old Sundanese corpus is standard (Noorduyn & Teeuw 2006; Gunawan's gebang codicology), and the death of the tradition at Islamization is the accepted explanation for its terminal age structure. But the primary clause is a full census - under fifty codices worldwide, zero copied after 1700, at least half sole witnesses, median physical age exceeding the Balinese median by over two hundred years - and that count, with its cross-corpus median comparison, is explicitly 'not yet built.' The qualitative inversion is in print; the numeric census and the two-hundred-year median gap are un-run. Adjacent.

• J. Noorduyn & A. Teeuw, Three Old Sundanese Poems (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2006)
• Aditia Gunawan, 'Nipah or Gebang? A Philological and Codicological Study Based on Sundanese Sources', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 171 (2015)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.