AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Bureaus coin, monks borrow
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).
Claim (verbatim)
Bureaus coin, monks borrow: in the Sanskrit-Chinese transmission, terminological innovation was institutional, not chronological. State translation bureaus — staffed with bilingual philologists and armed with imperial authority — coined novel technical vocabulary freely, while lone translator-monks of the same decades reused familiar, often Daoist-flavored vocabulary, because their uptake depended on immediate audience recognition. The celebrated drift from concept-matching to precision is really a difference between organizational forms, and it should persist inside any single half-century that contains both kinds of translator — a controlled comparison the received chronological story cannot survive.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For translated texts in CBETA with translator and patronage attributions from the early catalogues, measure first-attested technical binomes per 1,000 tokens. Primary clause: within the same half-century cohort, bureau-team translations introduce first-attested technical terms at at least twice the rate of translations by unsponsored individuals; the verdict follows this clause, and the within-cohort control is what distinguishes it from the standard chronological account. Secondary clause: bureau coinages show higher survival, measured as reuse in post-900 CBETA texts.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the CBETA corpus with translator and patronage attributions from the Chu sanzang jiji (Taisho 2145) and the Kaiyuan shijiao lu (Taisho 2154), all machine-readable within CBETA.
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 scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
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); 188-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w02_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W02 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. DEVIATION DISCLOSURE: after an output-limit resume, one accidental no-op placeholder Write to the session scratchpad preceded this packet Write; nothing was read and no information entered the generation; blindness intact, but the run used two Writes, not one.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The institutional structure of state translation bureaus versus lone translators, and the standard narrative of terminological drift from concept-matching (geyi) to precision, are well published (Siu 2024 on Tang team translation; Kumarajiva's bureau coining core vocabulary). The within-cohort control — first-attestation coinage rates of sponsored versus unsponsored translators of the same half-century — is exactly what is un-run.
Predictions
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