Buy the book in one language, sign it in another

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)

Colophons name patrons; texts serve liturgy — and at Turfan and Khara-Khoto the two often speak different languages, a vernacular donor statement riding on a liturgical-language book. Join the sociology of donation to the book trade: merit is a purchase, and the receipt must be legible to the buyer and the buyer's community even when the merchandise is not, so where colophon language differs from text language the direction should be almost always vernacular colophon on liturgical text, and the named patrons should be overwhelmingly lay. Monks read the text; donors read the colophon. If this holds, colophon-language statistics become a census of the lay book market — who was buying religion, in which language, at which oasis — recoverable even where no other economic record survives.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict-bearing): among items whose colophon language differs from the main text language, over 80% carry the vernacular in the colophon and the liturgical or classical language in the text. Secondary clause: identifiable patrons in such colophons are majority lay donors rather than monastics.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Digitales Turfan-Archiv and IDP (including Khara-Khoto holdings) records where colophon language and text language are separately catalogued.

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 blind in a single Write by a fresh instance with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was inline in the launching prompt.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Donor colophons on Uyghur and Tangut Buddhist books are a studied genre (book forms and donor colophons; colophons naming lay sponsors and their merit expectations), but the direction statistic — vernacular colophon on liturgical-language text in over 80% of mismatched items, with lay-donor majority — has not been computed as a lay-market census.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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