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Sogdian Under the Skin
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)
A community's first missionaries leave fingerprints in its deepest vocabulary that later, larger contacts cannot dislodge. Old Uyghur Buddhism of the 9th-14th centuries took most of its texts from Chinese, yet its core technical lexicon - nom for dharma (Greek nomos through Sogdian nwm), chshapt for shiksapada, nizvani for klesha, shmnu for Mara, hormuzta for Indra - wears Sogdian phonology, because the Turks' first Buddhism (8th-10th centuries) came through Sogdian carriers whose terminology fossilized before the Chinese translation wave. Restated as prediction: a loan-etymology census of high-frequency Uyghur Buddhist terms will show Iranian-mediated shapes dominating even inside texts translated from Chinese originals - the bridge language over-represented far beyond its share of the surviving manuscripts.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: among the 40 highest-frequency Buddhist technical terms attested in the Uigurica corpus, at least 50% show phonological shapes derivable only through a Sogdian (or other Iranian/Tocharian) intermediary rather than directly from Sanskrit or Chinese, and this share exceeds the Sogdian fraction of Turfan Buddhist manuscripts by a factor of at least 3; coverage guard: at least 30 of the 40 terms must carry established etymologies, else inconclusive.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill (not yet built): an etymology table over the glossaries of F. W. K. Mueller's Uigurica I-III (Berlin, 1908-1922, archive.org), classifying each high-frequency doctrinal term's donor path as direct-Sanskrit, direct-Chinese, or Iranian-mediated, and counting the proportions.
Browse the registry: Dunhuang & Turfan hoards →
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.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Steppe & Central Asia; East Asia; Medieval Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 700 CE – 1400 CE Sogdian-mediated Buddhist vocabulary entered Turkic Buddhism via first-contact carriers (8th-10th c.), fossilizing in Old Uyghur Buddhist texts of the 9th-14th centuries. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Subject — Assigned
- Philology, editions & stemmatics (from the generation section)
- Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies
- No listed Atlas subject page is squarely about Old Uyghur Buddhist vocabulary. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- World claim The primary clause is the etymological shape of a technical lexicon, a fact about language contact, with the manuscript-share comparison stacked beneath it. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Assigned
- Channel dissociation The same doctrinal content reached Old Uyghur through an early Iranian channel and a later Chinese one, and the prediction is a channel-locked lexical signature at odds with the surviving manuscript channel. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Dunhuang & Turfan hoards; Not yet built; Published editions Kill test needs an etymology table over the glossaries of Mueller's Uigurica, classifying each high-frequency term's donor path; the kill text flags it as not yet built. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
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
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-20, for the connected-Old-World (movement-signatures) wave. The sixteen items lean on digit-string error phylogeny, first-translation-lag profiles (backlog cliffs and two-pulse corridors), bridge-language fingerprints (Sogdian, Aramaic-chancery, Judeo-Arabic), attribution drift, and pulse/directional asymmetries, with five anti-connection wagers (ordinals 2, 9, 13, 14, 15) where independence or non-transmission is the predicted outcome.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
That the core doctrinal lexicon of Old Uyghur Buddhism wears Sogdian phonology even inside texts translated from Chinese originals is firmly established Turcology: the examples in the claim (nom, chshapt, nizvani, shmnu, hormuzta) are the standard set and are correctly described, and the Sogdian-first versus Chinese-first debate over the origins of Uyghur Buddhism is explicit in the literature. What has not been done, to my knowledge, is the pinned census: a frequency-ranked forty-term etymological table over the Uigurica glossaries with an over-representation ratio computed against the Sogdian share of Turfan Buddhist manuscripts. The bridge-language over-representation number is therefore new even though the qualitative fingerprint is settled, and the by-3x manuscript-share comparison is a genuine measurement rather than a restatement. Adjacent.
Sources cited by the triage
- F. W. K. Muller, Uigurica I-III, Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1908-1922. — The pinned corpus; its glossaries already note the Sogdian forms.
- Annemarie von Gabain, Altturkische Grammatik, Leipzig, 1941 (3rd ed., Wiesbaden, 1974).
- Jens Wilkens, “Buddhism in the West Uyghur Kingdom and Beyond,” in Carmen Meinert (ed.), Transfer of Buddhism Across Central Asian Networks (7th to 13th Centuries), Brill, 2016. — Surveys the Sogdian-mediated terminology and the origins debate.
Predictions
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