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The ear rhymes, the exam spells
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Claim (verbatim)
The ear rhymes, the exam spells. Joins the two poetic registers of Song China to two enforcement institutions: regulated shi verse was examination technology, rhymed against the frozen categories of the official rhyme books long after speech had moved on, while ci lyrics were written to living melodies for singers whose audiences heard rhyme with their ears, not their rhyme dictionaries. One and the same poet should therefore rhyme like a phonologist's informant in ci and like a bureaucrat in shi — sound change leaking into the sung genre centuries before the examined genre admits it.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For Song poets with substantial corpora in both genres, machine-check rhymes against Guangyun categories. Primary clause: in at least 80 percent of poets with 50 or more poems per genre, the rate of cross-category rhyming (Guangyun-illegal but phonologically motivated) is higher in their ci than in their regulated shi. Secondary: the pooled ci rate is at least five times the pooled shi rate. The verdict follows the within-poet 80 percent clause.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Quan Song ci and Quan Song shi electronic corpora with Guangyun rhyme-category tables, as jointly implemented in the Sou-yun poetry database (sou-yun.cn).
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries; single packet Write was the only tool use); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen (sidecar docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_titlelist_20260708.md); prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w01_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W01 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That examination shi were rhymed against frozen Qieyun/Guangyun-derived categories while ci rhyming ran broader and closer to living speech (later codified post hoc from practice in the Cilin zhengyun) is established in Chinese historical phonology, which mines Song ci rhymes for real sound change; but the within-poet paired comparison of Guangyun-illegal rhyme rates across the two genres has not been run.
- Rime dictionaries: examination rhyming per Qieyun/Pingshui categories vs ci practice
- Guangyun and Pingshui rhyme systems
- Lu Guoyao, studies of Song ci rhyming as dialect-phonological evidence (e.g., 'Songdai Sichuan ciren yongyun kao')
Predictions
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