Heaps' law in clay

Status: Open

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Heaps' law in clay. Cuneiform sign inventory grows with corpus size by Heaps' law, and the exponent should collapse during Old Babylonian school standardization. Falsify: the digitized CDLI corpus.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

the digitized CDLI corpus.

Provenance

Run: Imported conversation (verbatim harvest) · model: claude-fable-5

Origin: operator conversation with Claude Fable 5 at max effort, conducted 2026-07-03, relayed verbatim by the operator into the shepherd session on 2026-07-04. No ModelRun exists for the original generation (it happened outside the pipeline); this transcript file is the canonical capture. Transcript path: docs/generated/conjecture_harvest_fablemax_20260703.md. Model (operator-attested, not pipeline-recorded): claude-fable-5. Novelty disclaimer (verbatim, load-bearing -- rule 4): "Same caveat as before, doubled: at 100 items across all of archaeology and history, some of these will have cousins in the literature I can't check. What I can guarantee is the format — each links two things not normally linked, and each names the dataset or measurement that would kill it."

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-04)

Heaps'/Herdan's law is well studied across corpora and even non-linguistic domains, but no application to cuneiform sign inventories was located, nor the sharp secondary claim (exponent collapse at Old Babylonian school standardization). No prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-04). NOTE: unresolvable in-house — Phase A confirmed CDLI transliterations (sign-level text) are not held locally; catalogue metadata only.

Heaps' law literature (e.g., 'Heaps' Law and Heaps functions in tagged texts', PMC) — General law; no cuneiform application found

Predictions

Open registered 2026-07-04

OPEN prediction (in-house resolution impossible — CDLI transliterations confirmed not held): the cuneiform sign inventory grows with corpus size by Heaps' law (V = K*N^beta, 0 < beta < 1), and beta drops discontinuously across the Old Babylonian school-standardization transition.

Resolution criteria: Resolvable against public sign-level corpora (CDLI/ORACC transliterations) by computing type-token growth curves within period strata. SUPPORTED if the growth fits a sublinear power law (R^2 >= 0.95 on log-log) in every period stratum AND the fitted beta in post-standardization Old Babylonian strata is lower than in pre-standardization strata by more than the bootstrap 95% interval width. KILLED if vocabulary growth is linear or exponent-stable across the standardization transition.

Known priors disclosure: No sign-level data in-house (Phase-A finding: catalogue metadata only). The registrant holds the general prior that type-token curves are near-universally sublinear — hence the kill condition is pinned to the sharper standardization-collapse clause, not to sublinearity alone.

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