The autocorrect that multiplies readings

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)

The Homeric epics are built from formulas — prefabricated metrical phrases like 'swift-footed Achilles' — and their manuscript witnesses disagree with one another in thousands of places. The surprising connection is that the formula system itself was the variant factory: a line rich in formulaic material could always be regenerated from the system when a copyist or reciter stumbled, and the system offered several metrically perfect, semantically near-equivalent ways to rebuild it. So high formulaic density should produce more substitution variants (equivalent phrases swapped in) yet fewer nonsense corruptions and omissions, because the tradition carried a built-in autocorrect that corrected toward plurality rather than toward a single exemplar. If this holds, the notorious 'goodness' of Homeric variants — almost all metrical, almost all sensible — stops being a puzzle about careful scribes and becomes a measurable property of formulaic redundancy.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Score every line of the Iliad for formulaic density (share of its cola paralleled elsewhere in the two epics). Primary clause, which decides the verdict: in the collated witnesses, lines in the top density quartile show a per-line rate of metrical substitution variants at least 1.5 times that of the bottom quartile. Secondary clause: those same top-quartile lines show unmetrical or nonsense variants at no more than 0.5 times the bottom-quartile rate.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Homer Multitext project: its collated multiform witnesses of the Iliad and Odyssey (the Venetus A and other codices plus papyri), cross-tabulated with a formula-density scoring of the vulgate text.

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge with zero tool use and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Bird and the Homer Multitext school argue at length that papyrus variants are formulaic multiforms of oral provenance — metrical, sensible, system-generated — so the mechanism is fully anticipated. But no one has run the per-line formula-density quartile regression against substitution vs nonsense variant rates in the collated witnesses.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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