Resolution: Supported
Caveats: SUPPORTED on the registered primary clause, with the anti-connection wager holding at a 3.2x margin: under the most INCLUSIVE pinned reading, 1 in ~650 Byzantine book epigrams carries any explicit translation-from-a-named-language marking. Robustness runs one way by construction: (i) the registered rule deliberately over-counts - five of the twenty accepted hits are bare-metaphrasis occurrences confirmed at the verdict desk to be the Symeon Metaphrastes (Greek-to-Greek rewriting) tradition, and the glottonym+language-word collocations need not all mark translation - so the prediction's stricter verbatim reading ('translation into Greek from a named foreign language') yields <= 15 hits, ~0.12%, clearing the bar by ~4x. (ii) The one-sided undercount risk was disclosed at registration; the compute documented exactly one probable false negative (occ 20685, a genuine Arabic-to-Greek translation-prologue epigram missed by literal stem morphology) - including it gives 0.163%; breaching 0.5% would require ~45 further missed genuine marker epigrams against a 213-candidate raw sweep, which the registrant judges implausible; that lone caught Arabic-to-Greek prologue is the exception that displays the rarity. (iii) SECONDARY clause (>= 50:1 Greek-vs-foreign author naming) unresolvable per the registered fallback: DBBE's person schema carries only Byzantine-prosopography cross-references, no language/origin field; the tempting translation_language facet records modern scholarly translations (false lead, documented); geographic epithets were tested and rejected as a proxy (Ioannes of Damascus < Syria wrote in Greek). Per the registered precedence the primary verdict is unaffected; the secondary is recorded unresolved, not failed. (iv) The pinned manual-QC step was load-bearing exactly as the dbbe-014 lesson predicted: 93% of Rhos- raw hits were rhosis 'vigour', all Kopt- hits were kopto 'cut', plus syro/Perseus/phragellion collisions - without QC the raw rate would have been ~1.65%, a tenfold error. (v) Scope honesty: this is a record-altitude fact about Byzantine paratextual self-presentation - the page's silence about receiving - not proof that nothing crossed; the wave's other items measure what did. Blind compute claude-sonnet-5; verdict claude-fable-5.
OPEN prediction (anti-connection wager): fewer than 0.5% of DBBE epigram occurrences with full recorded text carry any explicit marker of translation into Greek from a named foreign language, and Greek-author naming outnumbers foreign-language-author naming by at least 50:1 - Byzantine book paratexts enforce the empire's self-image as source, never receiver.
Resolution criteria — the registered fine print
Resolution criteria: VERBATIM PREDICTION: 'fewer than 0.5% of DBBE epigrams with full recorded text contain any explicit marker of translation into Greek from a named foreign language (Syriac, Arabic, Latin, Georgian, Slavonic, or other), and epigrams naming Greek fathers or classical authors outnumber epigrams naming any foreign-language author by at least 50 to 1; coverage guard: at least 5,000 epigram occurrences with full text searched, else inconclusive.' OPERATIONALIZATION (pinned ex ante): Instrument = DBBE (dbbe.ugent.be), live at compute date; the compute records query date and the total count of occurrences with non-empty full text (snapshot pin). Unit = occurrence with non-empty full text; denominator = all such occurrences. A translation-marker hit = an occurrence whose text contains (a) a term of the pinned translation lexicon - stems metaphra-, metaphras-, metaglott-, or hermeneu-/hermenei- and metabal-/metabol- ONLY when the same occurrence also contains a pinned glottonym - or (b) a pinned language-source term - Syr-/Syriak-, Arabik-/Agaren-/Saraken-, Latinik-/Ital-/Phrang-, Iber-/Georgian-, Sklab-/Boulgar-/Rhos-, Hebraik-, Aigypti-/Kopt-, Pers-, Armeni- (Greek script; stem-match) - in a translation context, i.e. collocated in the same occurrence with glossa/phone/dialektos or a lexicon-(a) term. Rhomai- does NOT count as Latin (Byzantine self-designation). Every raw hit passes a manual QC read per the dbbe-014 collision lesson; each accept/reject is logged and may cite only the written rule, never the running tally. CLAUSE PRECEDENCE (ex ante): PRIMARY, verdict-bearing = the <0.5% marker rate. SECONDARY, qualifying only = the 50:1 author-naming ratio, computed from DBBE's person/author metadata associations (Greek patristic + classical persons vs foreign-language authors), method documented before counting; if the metadata cannot support it, the secondary is reported unresolvable with reasons and does not affect the primary verdict. VERDICTS: guard unmet -> INCONCLUSIVE-BY-COVERAGE; guard met and rate >= 0.5% -> KILLED; guard met and rate < 0.5% -> SUPPORTED (qualified by the secondary outcome).
Known-priors disclosure — what the registrant already knew
Known priors disclosure: Triaged adjacent 2026-07-20: that translation into Greek was rare is qualitative common ground in Byzantine studies; the pinned epigram-corpus census is unlocated. The registrant knows the qualitative direction and has computed nothing; no marker counts, rates, or DBBE totals are known. Neighbors disclosed: the byzantine-dbbe-pinakes wave's epigram items measure single-witness structure, renewal notices, and the post-1453 tail - different quantities; dbbe-014's lexical-collision lesson binds the QC step here. Risk disclosed: hermeneu- is polysemous (interpret/translate); the glottonym-collocation requirement is the ex-ante control, and its strictness may undercount - direction disclosed (undercounting favors the wager; the QC log makes this auditable).
Method and dataset — how it was measured
Register-before-compute held (registration 15:05:52Z, packet 9c516ba; compute launched after). The blind compute applied the registered marker rule - unconditional metaphra-/metaphras-/metaglott- stems; hermeneu-/metabal- stems conditional on a pinned glottonym in the same occurrence; glottonym+glossa/phone/dialektos collocations; Rhomai- never counts - with accent-normalized stem matching and a mandatory per-hit QC log. Raw sweep: 236 stem rows = 213 unique occurrences; accepted after QC: 20 unique occurrences. PRIMARY QUANTITY: 20/12,911 = 0.155% vs the registered < 0.5% bar; coverage guard (>= 5,000 full-text occurrences) met at 2.6x. Orchestrator desk-check: all 22 accept rows read individually; one accepted occurrence live-sampled (occ 17146: 'Metaphraste, syggrapheis ego lego') confirming the five bare-metaphrasis accepts are the Symeon Metaphrastes tradition.
Dataset: DBBE (dbbe.ugent.be), queried 2026-07-20 via its public search_api plus individual occurrence pages (bulk CSV export capped at ~1000 rows, documented and not used; no robots.txt exists - polite throttled access with identified UA). Population: 12,911 occurrences with non-empty full text, of 13,036 total - cross-validated two independent ways (empty-field subtraction; union of 24 letter-prefix queries).
computed 2026-07-20