# r2-edh-b1-13

**Claim (as registered):** Latin-West provinces (21, named in advance) show a non-Latin (Greek or bilingual) inscribed-language share under 5%, while Greek-East provinces (6, named in advance) show a share of 5% or more.

**Proposed mechanism:** A well-documented linguistic-cultural boundary in Roman provincial epigraphy (sometimes called the Jireček line) separating a Latin-dominant West from a Greek-dominant East, expected to reproduce in a properly-classified province set regardless of alphabetical position.

**Scope:** Source: the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), a catalogue of Roman-period inscriptions on stone/metal/etc. (physical objects, catalogued separately from a manuscript census). Training: the 33 provinces in the alphabetically first half of EDH's own province-code order (42,009 inscriptions). Holdout: the 33 provinces in the alphabetically second half, minus 'Provincia incerta' (EDH's own catch-all for uncertain findspots, not a real geographic unit, excluded from all arithmetic) -- 32 real provinces, 39,457 inscriptions -- landed in one complete fetch after the claim was fixed. EDH's own content has been fixed since 2021 (the cataloguing project's funding ended), so this holdout tests whether a pattern generalizes across an arbitrary alphabetical split of already-catalogued, unchanging material, not whether it predicts new discoveries. Two named groups (21 Latin-West provinces, 6 Greek-East provinces); minimum support 30 rows per province.

**Training-side evidence:** Latin-West training analogues range 0.0-1.89% non-Latin. Greek-East training analogues range 7.95-48.10% non-Latin, with one complication (an Arabian province) at about 9.0%, near the Greek-East group's low end.

**Holdout test and outcome:** 19 of 19 eligible Latin-West holdout provinces (100%) landed under 5% non-Latin. 4 of 5 eligible Greek-East holdout provinces (80%) landed at 5% or more.

**Status:** Survived (both named groups cleared their own 80% group-level pass threshold).
