Order outlives inventory

Claim (verbatim)

Order outlives inventory. Connects the world's longest translation chain — Kalila and Dimna from Sanskrit through Middle Persian and Arabic into Syriac, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Castilian — to a two-speed model of what a book is to its transmitters: chapters are detachable assets that patrons and translators add, drop, or rededicate, but the sequence of what is kept is the book's spine, reproduced by scribes who had no incentive to shuffle it. Inventory should churn at every linguistic border while relative order sails through almost untouched.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Across six landmark versions (Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic, the Old Syriac, Symeon Seth's Greek, Rabbi Joel's Hebrew, John of Capua's Latin, the Alfonsine Castilian), primary clause: for every version pair, the Kendall rank correlation of shared-chapter order is at least +0.8. Secondary: the chapter-inventory Jaccard overlap falls below 0.75 in at least half the pairs. The verdict follows the order clause; inventory churn is the foil, not the test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the chapter concordance tables in Francois de Blois, Burzoy's Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalilah wa Dimnah (Royal Asiatic Society, 1990).

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The comparative study of chapter presence and sequence across the Kalila wa-Dimna versions is exactly de Blois's terrain (his sequence groups), and the recent Freie Universitat Berlin edition project and the Brill 'Unruly Classic' volume tabulate which chapters each version contains and in what order. So closely related prior work directly addresses the item's two variables (inventory and order). But the item's specific two-speed formulation -- order highly conserved (pairwise Kendall >=+0.8) while inventory churns (Jaccard <0.75) -- was not located as a stated finding, and the located scholarship in fact reports substantial chapter-ORDER variation across versions, which makes the primary (order-stability) clause a genuine, possibly-falsifiable test rather than a settled result.

• Francois de Blois, Burzoy's Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalilah wa Dimnah (Royal Asiatic Society, 1990) — Chapter concordance / sequence groups across versions (the kill dataset)
• Kalila and Dimna -- AnonymClassic edition project, Freie Universitat Berlin; and Beatrice Gruendler et al., An Unruly Classic: Kalila and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (Brill) — Cross-version chapter presence/order tabulated; documents significant order variation

Predictions

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