AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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A tradition of one-song names
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).
Claim (verbatim)
Pillet-Carstens numbers roughly 460 named troubadours, with the anonymous corpus banked separately under PC 461, and those 460 names share about 2,500 surviving pieces - a mean near five and a half songs per poet. This conjecture claims the mean is a fiction stretched over a violently skewed distribution: a thin, canonized head holding half the tradition, and a long tail of poets who exist by exactly one text. The mechanism is the compiler's unit of memory: chansonniers aggregated court repertories a century after the fact, admitting each poet in proportion to fame at compilation time, so the roster is a fame distribution frozen late - and a name that entered with a single piece is not a minor talent accurately measured but the visible rim of a crater, the last sliver of a corpus that once had to be large enough to make a reputation at all. Nobody became a nameable troubadour by writing one song; the singletons are poets whose output was rounded down to the survival threshold. Counting them bounds the missing majority from inside the record: every singleton certifies a career's worth of vanished pieces, and the size of the singleton class measures how much of the roster stands at the very edge of nonexistence.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in BEdT's attribution table, excluding the anonymous bucket (PC 461) and counting each contested piece once under its BEdT primary heading, at least one-third of named troubadours will have exactly one surviving attributed piece, and the top decile of poets by corpus size will hold at least half of all attributed texts (primary clause: the one-third singleton share of the named roster; the verdict follows it). The test voids if the extracted named-poet roster runs under 400.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: BEdT attribution counts per poet - the histogram of poets by number of attributed pieces, its singleton share, and the top-decile text share.
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.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, troubadour/Old Occitan wave instrument-anchored on the BEdT (Bibliografia Elettronica dei Trovatori, bedt.it - per-song PC identities, per-chansonnier attestations, per-witness attributions, genres, dates, music fields), with the printed censuses as controls: Pillet-Carstens 1933, Frank's Repertoire metrique 1953-57, the chansonnier sigla corpus (Brunel 1935; Zufferey 1987), Boutiere-Schutz for vidas/razos, Marshall 1969/1972 for the grammars, van der Werf 1984 for melodies. Every Kill names one instrument and one countable/positional/attestation-geometric operation; thresholds far from 1; disambiguation rules and coverage guards pinned inside each prediction; one item (no. 8, the mention-census diff) carries an honest 'Kill (not yet built)'. DISJOINTNESS from owned European lyric ground, checked by grep across all packets: w01 no.30 'Biography replaces the stage' owns vida/razo geography-of-production (this wave never tests vida presence by region); w07 no.2 'The life replaces the tune' owns the vida-melody substitution and the A/B/I/K-vs-G/R/W/X contrast (this wave's melody items run different arithmetic - per-poet text-mass concentration in no.1 and R's internal empty-stave audit in no.16, both flagged adjacent); w07 no.38 'Anthologies are funerals' owns the composition-to-witness time-lag operation, so that steer was DROPPED here and replaced by the home-vs-export archiving order (no.10, a different geometry, flagged adjacent); w07 no.49 'Hymns steal from love songs' owns melody-concordance contrafacture direction (no.6 here is metrical, within-Occitan, a Frank-scheme ghost-model census, flagged adjacent); w07 no.41 owns Dante-vs-Franco-Italian epic (no.12 here is the De vulgari eloquentia citation channel, a different claim). Honesty flags: melody totals (roughly 250) and the trobairitz roster vary by edition and are pinned to named instruments inside each prediction; gallery-roster identifications follow the critical editions; no in-house BEdT extract exists yet, so 'immediately resolvable' means the instrument is live and public while the harvest itself is a small build.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The violently skewed roster - a canonized head against a long tail of one-song names - is the standard picture in the surveys from Jeanroy to Riquer, and the raw enumeration exists in Pillet-Carstens; but the literature states the skew, not the histogram: no published count fixes the singleton share of the named roster or the top-decile text share, and whether exactly-one-piece poets reach one-third of the roster is open arithmetic, not a stated result.
- A. Pillet & H. Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle, 1933)
- A. Jeanroy, La poesie lyrique des troubadours, 2 vols. (Toulouse-Paris, 1934)
- M. de Riquer, Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1975)
Predictions
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