AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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One witness, two claimants
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)
BEdT records, song by song, what each chansonnier's heading says about who wrote it, and the headings disagree constantly: the corpus carries hundreds of rival attributions. This conjecture is about where that noise bites - at the roster's tail, where an attribution is not metadata but existence. Flip the heading of a one-song poet's one song and the poet vanishes into somebody else's collected works. And the flipping was not symmetric: compilers and later scribes resolved uncertainty toward names they knew, the same gravitation that swelled the spurious ends of the Bernart de Ventadorn and Peire Vidal corpora, so contested songs drift canon-ward and the tail erodes toward the head. The countable consequence is that a startling share of the tradition's outer roster should stand on contested testimony: singleton poets whose entire existence depends on preferring one manuscript's heading over another's, with the rival heading usually belonging to a bigger name. Where that is so, the tail of the named roster is not a twelfth-century fact but an editorial decision taken heading by heading - and the true count of minor troubadours is systematically undercounted by exactly the mechanism that made the famous more famous.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in BEdT, among poets with exactly one attributed piece under the primary-heading rule, at least one in five of those pieces will carry at least one rival manuscript attribution, and in at least two-thirds of those conflicts the rival claimant will be a poet with ten or more attributed pieces (primary clause: the one-in-five contested-singleton rate; the verdict follows it). Rival headings that are anonymous count as conflicts but not toward the big-rival clause. The test voids if per-witness attribution fields are populated for under 70 percent of the singleton set.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: BEdT per-witness attribution fields - the contested-singleton census, and the corpus sizes of the rival claimants.
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
Attribution drift toward famous names is established attribution criticism - the spurious tails of the Bernart de Ventadorn and Peire Vidal corpora are set-pieces, and Pillet-Carstens already registers rival headings song by song - but the incidence of contested attribution specifically over the singleton tail, and the two-thirds big-rival clause, have never been counted on per-witness attribution fields.
- C. Appel (ed.), Bernart von Ventadorn: seine Lieder (Halle, 1915)
- D'A.S. Avalle, I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d'oc, ed. L. Leonardi (Turin, 1993)
- A. Pillet & H. Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle, 1933)
Predictions
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