Taboos die faster in contracts

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Taboos die faster in contracts. Tabooed-graph avoidance has two different carriers that the handbooks conflate: in freshly composed documents it is performed etiquette — current politics inked in real time — while in sutra copying it is inherited from the exemplar, because a copyist reproducing a sacred text reproduces its graph shapes along with its words. When a dynasty falls, its taboos should evaporate from contracts and letters within years but linger in scripture copies for generations: the same manuscript hoard carries a fast political clock and a slow scribal clock side by side.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among dated 9th-10th-century Dunhuang items, score observance of the high-frequency Tang imperial taboos (min and shi written with omitted strokes or substitutions) separately in (a) contracts, letters, and circulars and (b) Buddhist scripture copies. Primary clause (verdict follows it): in items dated after 907, taboo observance in class (b) exceeds class (a) by at least 20 percentage points. Secondary: within class (a) observance falls below 20 percent within twenty years of 907, while class (b) stays above 40 percent through the mid-10th century.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) images and catalogue of dated Dunhuang documents and dated sutra copies — stroke omission is directly visible on the photographs, and the dated-manuscript censuses (Giles's dated catalogue of the Stein collection) index the item classes.

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.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

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

Dou Huaiyong's work dates taboo methods from 600+ dated Dunhuang manuscripts, and Galambos notes genre-differential taboo observance (court-commissioned sutras versus other texts), anticipating the two-carrier mechanism; the post-907 differential decay-rate comparison between contracts and scripture copies is un-run.

Predictions

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