AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Format converts before script
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)
Format converts before script. The Tibetan-period Dunhuang corpus should show a double dissociation between two channels of borrowing. Liturgy imports FORMAT: Chinese-language Buddhist texts appear on Tibetan-style pothi leaves because the leaf format itself carried ritual prestige and suited recitation. Administration and schooling import SCRIPT: Chinese-language texts written phonetically in Tibetan letters served people who spoke Chinese but were schooled, under the occupation and after it, in Tibetan writing. Sacred form travels with the liturgy; graphic code travels with the chancery — and the two borrowings should sort onto nearly disjoint text populations.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Classify Dunhuang items into (a) pothi-format leaves carrying Chinese-language text and (b) Tibetan-script phonetic transcriptions of Chinese. Primary clause (verdict follows it): at least 80 percent of class (a) is Buddhist liturgical or scriptural, AND the secular-or-pedagogic share of class (b) exceeds the secular share of class (a) by at least 30 percentage points — the conjunction must hold. Secondary: class (b) concentrates after 848, the post-occupation bilingual generation, while class (a) concentrates during 787-848.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the IDP's catalogued Stein, Pelliot chinois, and Pelliot tibetain holdings, where format (pothi versus scroll) and script are catalogue-level fields on imaged items.
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
Galambos (2024) treats Chinese-language pothi books of Tibetan-period Dunhuang directly, and Takata's line of work covers Tibetan-script transcriptions of Chinese for post-occupation users, anticipating both channels; the double-dissociation percentages across the two classes are un-run.
Predictions
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