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The better translation lives as a lodger
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)
The twelfth-century Sicilian translations of Greek astronomy directly from the Greek were textually superior to their Arabic-Latin rivals, yet barely circulated — the fact is known, the shape of their survival is not. The surprising connection is that where the Greek-Latin versions survive, they survive PARASITICALLY: bound into codices whose main text is the rival Arabic-Latin version, as comparative supplements rather than working texts, because the Arabic-Latin versions carried the numerical apparatus and the curriculum while the Greek-Latin text had prestige but no tables to plug into. Transmission success in science thus tracked apparatus compatibility, not textual quality — and this is countable. If this holds, the survival of any scientific translation should be predictable from what it interoperates with, not from how good it is.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus codex descriptions, at least 60% of surviving Greek-Latin Almagest-tradition witnesses will occur in codices that also contain Arabic-Latin translation material or tables derived from it, while under 20% of Arabic-Latin witnesses will co-occur with any Greek-Latin material. Primary clause: the asymmetric co-occurrence (60% versus 20%); the verdict follows it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus (PAL) codex content descriptions across both translation traditions.
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
The bare survival contrast is long published (Haskins: the c.1160 Sicilian Greek-Latin Almagest survives in four manuscripts against hundreds for Gerard's version), but the claimed parasitic shape of that survival — Greek-Latin witnesses bound as supplements into Arabic-Latin codices, with apparatus compatibility as the predictor — is an un-run codicological test not found in PAL-based scholarship.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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