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English drinks from the shallow end
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Middle English medical writing is routinely described as translated 'from the Latin tradition', as if the whole Latin corpus fed it. The surprising connection is that the vernacular tapped almost exclusively the short-text layer — epitomes, compendia, and extracts — rather than the full treatises those short texts abridged, so the English corpus is a census of Latin abridgement, not of Latin medicine. The mechanism is economic: vernacular translation was practitioner-driven and paid by use, and nobody commissions an English rendering of a five-hundred-leaf treatise when an epitome fits in one quire. If this holds, the silences of the Middle English corpus map which full Latin treatises had already gone textually inert by 1400 — a fossil record of obsolescence.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Statistical test: cross-matching eVK incipits to Latin sources in eTK, at least 75% of Middle English medical texts with an identifiable Latin source will match an abbreviated, compiled, or excerpted Latin version rather than the corresponding full treatise, against a baseline under 50% if sources were sampled in proportion to surviving Latin witness counts. Primary clause: the 75% short-text share; the baseline contrast is secondary.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
eVK-to-eTK cross-identifications of Middle English medical texts and their Latin sources.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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 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
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use of any kind; the packet was generated entirely from the model's own knowledge and emitted as a single text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Voigts and successors document that Middle English medicine was largely Englished from Latin compendia and practica (the 'groundswell of Englishing'), so the direction is anticipated; but the corpus-wide census claim — ≥75% of ME texts sourcing the abridged layer against a witness-proportional baseline, with silences mapping Latin obsolescence — has not been run on eVK/eTK cross-matches.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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