AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The unfashionable books keep the otherwise-nothing
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Claim (verbatim)
Not all chansonniers are equal preservers, and the inequality runs opposite to prestige. The polished Italian canon-books A, B, I and K transmit a heavily shared repertory - the same export canon copied again and again with vidas attached - while the late, provincial, home-region giants C and R are stuffed with pieces nobody else kept. The mechanism: an Italian compiler selected from a mature, already-circulating canon, so his book mostly adds witnesses to songs that were safe anyway; C and R drained local repertory channels that had no Italian counterpart, so their pages add existence. This conjecture claims the gap is extreme and countable in two figures. First, the unica geography: the otherwise-unattested songs of the tradition concentrate overwhelmingly in the unfashionable books, so C and R together should out-carry the four great Italian canon-books combined by a wide multiple in unique pieces. Second, the corpus-wide fragility rate: a large minority of the whole surviving tradition should be single-witness - one damp cellar away from nonexistence - which both measures how much rested on individual compilation decisions and calibrates, by extrapolation, how much must have failed to meet even one compiler. The canon-books tell us what the tradition was proudest of; the unica census tells us what it almost lost, and by implication what it did.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in BEdT per-song witness lists, the unica counts of C and R combined will be at least twice the combined unica of A, B, I and K, and at least 30 percent of the whole lyric corpus will be single-witness (primary clause: the two-fold C-plus-R over A-plus-B-plus-I-plus-K unica ratio; the verdict follows it). A song attested in exactly two of the six named books is nobody's unicum; razo-embedded quotations do not count as witnesses. The test voids if any of the six manuscripts lacks a per-song content listing in the extract.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: BEdT per-song witness lists - the per-chansonnier unica census for C, R, A, B, I, K, and the corpus-wide single-witness rate.
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
That C and R teem with otherwise-unattested pieces while the Italian canon-books recopy a shared repertory is the received characterization of the tradition, stated in Avalle's account and in Marshall's survey of transmission; but the per-chansonnier unica census and the corpus-wide single-witness rate have not been published as figures, and the nearest quantitative loss-work - unseen-species modelling of medieval survival - ran on six other vernacular traditions, not on the troubadours; the two-fold unica ratio and the 30 percent fragility rate are un-run.
- D'A.S. Avalle, I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d'oc, ed. L. Leonardi (Turin, 1993)
- J.H. Marshall, The Transmission of Troubadour Poetry (inaugural lecture, Westfield College, London, 1975)
- M. Kestemont, F. Karsdorp et al., 'Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture', Science 375 (2022)
Predictions
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