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Street spelling is a second standard
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)
Novgorod's birch-bark texts use a distinctive everyday orthography — systematic vowel-letter interchanges that church parchment avoids. If those interchanges were mere incompetence, their density should fall with the writer's evident skill; if they formed a coherent second standard for secular writing, their density should be flat across skill levels and document stakes, and internally consistent within writers. The corpus is large enough to decide this by measuring interchange rates against independent skill proxies (hand regularity, formula control) and stakes (sums of money named). If flatness holds, medieval Novgorod ran two orthographies in parallel — one for God, one for money — and bad spelling in everyday writing was a register choice, not a deficit.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In gramoty.ru, everyday-orthography interchange rates per 100 characters show no significant negative correlation with skill proxies (|r| < 0.15), while individual writers are internally consistent (within-writer variance significantly below between-writer variance, p<0.01). Primary clause: the null correlation with skill — a statistical test.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
gramoty.ru (full texts with linguistic annotation).
In the kill-dataset registry:
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write from the inline prompt alone, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.
Novelty / leakage triage
already answered in the literature
This is Zaliznyak's published core result: the bytovaja sistema (everyday orthography, о/ъ and е/ь interchange) is a coherent parallel system used consistently by competent writers alongside the bookish standard, not a deficit — the exact two-orthographies conclusion the conjecture would 'discover'. Only the cosmetic re-dressing as correlation coefficients is new.
Predictions
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