AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
← All conjectures · East Asian text cultures
Phonograms funnel
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)
Phonograms funnel. The man'yogana graph-per-syllable inventory should narrow as poetry recording became clerical. Early Man'yoshu strata record poems through whichever graphs a given scribe's Chinese training suggested — a wide, idiosyncratic inventory — while later compilation strata are quasi-chancery work, and every chancery converges its script. The funnel should track the compilation stratum, not the poem's composition date: it is a fact about scribes, not poets, and it should appear only in the phonographic channel, not in logographic writing, which had no equivalent standardization pressure.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Group Man'yoshu poems by the standard chronological strata and book-groupings; compute per-stratum entropy of graph choice per syllable over phonographically written poems. Primary clause (verdict follows it): entropy declines monotonically across the four standard strata, with a total decline of at least 30 percent. Secondary: logographic (borrowed-reading) writing within the same strata shows no comparable decline, isolating the funnel to the phonographic channel.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (ONCOJ) and NINJAL's digitized Man'yoshu with graph-level annotation — open and queryable 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
Variation in man'yogana graph choice across Man'yoshu books and strata is a staple of Old Japanese philology (including editorial 'polishing' differences between books), anticipating the pattern; the per-stratum entropy computation with a logographic control channel is un-run.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
New here? Create an account first
Create an account or sign in and your feedback is tied to you — you can track it, get replies, and claim this conjecture so others know you’re working on it. Prefer not to? Just leave your take below as a guest — only the name you type is shown.
Add your take
Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.