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Poets known from one dictionary
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“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)
Asadi Tusi's Lughat-i Furs (لغت فرس, c. 458/1066) is the oldest surviving Persian dictionary, a glossary of rare and dialectal words each illustrated by a line of verse - and because Asadi drew his illustrative lines from the poets of the two centuries before him, the Lughat-i Furs is one of the densest reservoirs of early Persian poetry anywhere. It preserves verses of Rudaki, Daqiqi, Kisa'i, Abu Shakur Balkhi, Munjik Tirmidhi and many lesser names, and for a number of those poets it is effectively the sole witness: the single cited line is the entire surviving oeuvre. The mechanism is the lexical-specimen channel, cousin to the prosodist's cabinet but older and even more utilitarian - a word needed an example, an example needed an author, and the author was thereby ferried across a millennium as a caption to a definition. A poet reduced to a dictionary head-word's example has no divan behind him; his Ganjoor presence, if any, traces back to exactly this lexical gleaning. Prediction restated: a majority of the distinct poets Asadi cites as verse-authorities have no independent surviving divan and no Ganjoor corpus beyond such gleaned fragments - a dictionary that is, read the right way, a graveyard index of tenth-century poetry.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: of the distinct named poets cited as verse-authorities in Asadi's Lughat-i Furs (in the Dabir-Siyaqi or Mojtaba'i-Sadeghi critical edition), over 50 percent will have no independent author corpus on Ganjoor - surviving, if at all, only as such gleaned specimen lines (primary clause: the specimen-only share above 50 percent among Lughat-i Furs cited poets; the verdict follows it). A poet counts as surviving only on an attributed Ganjoor divan of more than a few gleaned bayts, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 40 distinct named poets can be extracted from the dictionary's citations.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the printed Lughat-i Furs of Asadi Tusi (Dabir-Siyaqi or Mojtaba'i-Sadeghi edition), whose apparatus indexes the poets cited as shahids, each scored for presence or absence of an independent author corpus on Ganjoor (ganjoor.net).
In the kill-dataset registry:
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
- Islamic world; Medieval Tagged by claude-fable-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 800 CE – 1100 CE Asadi Tusi's Lughat-i Furs (c.1066 CE) cites verse-authority poets spanning roughly two centuries before its compilation, from Rudaki and Daqiqi's 10th-c. era through its own 11th-c. date. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Texts, scribes & transmission The phenomenon is the lexical-specimen preservation channel that ferried single lines across a millennium, a transmission question and so texts_scribes; the curated head philology_stemmatics is out of scope, since no variant, stemma or attribution claim is registered. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Lost literary works Poets surviving only as a dictionary's illustrative line is squarely a lost-works context. 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
- Instrument claim The registered quantity is the share of a dictionary's cited poets with no Ganjoor corpus, i.e. the coverage of a modern digitized corpus of printed editions; the lexical-specimen channel is the offered mechanism. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Reviewed — none applies
- A specimen-only share above 50 percent among the dictionary's cited poets; a presence count. 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
- Digitized texts; Published editions Kill test lists the poets cited as verse-authorities in a critical edition of Asadi's Lughat-i Furs and scores each for an independent Ganjoor corpus. 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, 2026-07-17, Persianate wave instrument-anchored on the open Ganjoor corpus (ganjoor.net) with the Cambridge Shahnama Project as the second instrument where manuscript transmission is the question. Every Kill names one corpus and one countable/positional/citation-geometric operation, thresholds sit far from 1, disambiguation and name-matching rules are pinned inside each prediction, and coverage guards separate what Ganjoor holds (print-era critical editions) from what existed. DISJOINTNESS: the Nizami/Khamsa transmission ground and de Blois vol. V's Nizami dated-manuscript census are owned by minds-w02 (item 'The Khamsa is bound, not born') and are NOT re-posed here; the Rumi Masnavi return-formula operation on Ganjoor is owned by minds-w02 and avoided; the Ferdowsi age-statement / reign-boundary operation on the Ganjoor Shahnameh is owned by minds-w01 ('The Shahnameh keeps the poet's birthdays') and the Shahnama interpolation-topography / illustrated-extent / folio-grid / dispersal / defacement operations are owned by fable-w01 (#14), fable-w03 (#24) and fable-w05 (#3,#4,#11) on the Cambridge Shahnama Project - so the Daqiqi item here reuses the Ganjoor Shahnameh and Cambridge Shahnama instruments ONLY under a distinct survival-by-embedding operation, flagged in its Kill; prose Kalila wa Dimna transmission is owned by fable-w01 (#22) and fable-w07 (#11,#22), so the verse-Kalila point is folded into the Rudaki item and no standalone Kalila/Sindbad-nama item is posed. Safa's Tarikh-i adabiyat and de Blois' Bio-Bibliographical Survey are reused as census controls under attested-poet/attested-title operations distinct from the minds-w02 Nizami dated-ms count. NOTE cleared: the 'Mu'jam' in islamicate-openiti (#4) is Yaqut's geographical Mu'jam al-buldan, a different work from Shams-i Qays's prosody al-Mu'jam used here - no collision. DROPPED CANDIDATES: (a) Nizami's own lists / khamsa-imitation chains of lost romances - dropped as Nizami is owned by minds-w02; recast as the non-Nizami verse-romance census (item 12). (b) A standalone Sindbad-nama / verse-Kalila item - dropped, prose Kalila owned by fable-w01/w07; the verse-Kalila loss folded into item 1. (c) A raw-bayt genre-size comparison (three Ghaznavid panegyrists vs one lyricist) - dropped as FALSE on the numbers (Farrukhi's surviving divan alone is large), replaced by the within-Ganjoor pre-Mongol survival-concentration op (item 6). (d) A smooth recency-gradient census - replaced by the mechanistic Mongol-caesura step (item 4). CONFIDENCE FLAGS carried inside the items: Rudaki's 100,000-couplet attestation and 'Unsuri's ~30,000-bayt divan are classical topoi (kept out of the load-bearing clauses, which rest on the hard surviving counts); the exact women-poet roster and the Khayyam cross-attribution magnitude are MODERATE and primary clauses are phrased to survive the uncertainty.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The dictionary's role as a sole reservoir is established: Lazard's collection of the early poets is largely built from Lughat-i Furs citations, Baevskij's survey of early Persian lexicography describes the shahid channel, and the critical editions index the cited poets. But the specific rate - over half of the cited poets with no independent Ganjoor corpus - has never been tabulated; the qualitative many-survive-only-here does not fix a majority-share figure on a named digital roster.
Sources cited by the triage
- Asadi Tusi, Lughat-i Furs, ed. F. Mojtaba'i and 'A.-A. Sadiqi (Tehran, 1365sh/1986)
- G. Lazard, Les premiers poetes persans (IXe-Xe siecles), 2 vols (Tehran-Paris, 1964)
- S.I. Baevskij, Early Persian Lexicography: Farhangs of the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, trans. N. Killian (Folkestone, 2007)
Predictions
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