AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The bureau spells it once
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)
The bureau spells it once. The institutional roster of the state translation assembly (yichang) — which included a dedicated zhengzi orthography-rectifier and a bishou receiver — should be legible in the statistics of Sanskrit-name transliteration. A solo translator spells a foreign name as it comes to him that day; a bureau with a zhengzi enforces one binomial per name per project. Transliteration entropy is thus an institutional thermometer: it should drop stepwise with institutional form (archaic solo translators, then Kumarajiva's assembly, then Xuanzang's imperial bureau), not gradually with calendar time.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For a fixed panel of about 50 high-frequency proper names and terms (Sariputra, Ananda, nirvana, bodhisattva, etc.), count distinct transliteration forms per name within each translator-attributed corpus. Primary clause (verdict follows it): the mean number of distinct forms per name inside Xuanzang's corpus is at most half that inside the pre-401 archaic corpus, AND the drop between adjacent institutional regimes exceeds the drift within any single regime over an equal time span — a step function, not a slope. Secondary: within-text (as opposed to within-corpus) variance shows the same step.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: CBETA full-text search across Taisho translator attributions — the archaic strata versus Kumarajiva's corpus (T 223, T 262, etc.) versus Xuanzang's (T 220 and others). Resolvable against CBETA/SAT without new ingestion.
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); 248-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_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The institutional structure of translation assemblies and Xuanzang's systematic transliteration principles (wu bu fan) are well studied, and transcriptional forms are used for translator attribution, but the entropy-per-name-by-institutional-form operationalization across translator corpora is un-run.
Predictions
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