Taboos die faster in contracts

Claim (verbatim)

Taboos die faster in contracts. Tabooed-graph avoidance has two different carriers that the handbooks conflate: in freshly composed documents it is performed etiquette — current politics inked in real time — while in sutra copying it is inherited from the exemplar, because a copyist reproducing a sacred text reproduces its graph shapes along with its words. When a dynasty falls, its taboos should evaporate from contracts and letters within years but linger in scripture copies for generations: the same manuscript hoard carries a fast political clock and a slow scribal clock side by side.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among dated 9th-10th-century Dunhuang items, score observance of the high-frequency Tang imperial taboos (min and shi written with omitted strokes or substitutions) separately in (a) contracts, letters, and circulars and (b) Buddhist scripture copies. Primary clause (verdict follows it): in items dated after 907, taboo observance in class (b) exceeds class (a) by at least 20 percentage points. Secondary: within class (a) observance falls below 20 percent within twenty years of 907, while class (b) stays above 40 percent through the mid-10th century.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) images and catalogue of dated Dunhuang documents and dated sutra copies — stroke omission is directly visible on the photographs, and the dated-manuscript censuses (Giles's dated catalogue of the Stein collection) index the item classes.

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 apparatus is thoroughly studied: bihui (taboo-graph) avoidance is one of the standard instruments for dating Chinese texts, and Galambos's work on Dunhuang shows precisely that observance varies by text class -- court-commissioned sutras often do NOT observe the taboo while commentaries and popular narratives observe it inconsistently -- which both grounds the item and complicates its mechanism (the item's slow 'scribal clock' in scripture is not simply confirmed). Not located: the item's specific two-clock decay measurement -- post-907 taboo observance in Buddhist scripture copies exceeding that in contracts/letters by >=20 points, contract observance collapsing below 20% within twenty years of 907 while scripture stays above 40% into the mid-10th century -- run over dated IDP items. Established (and partly countervailing) datum, unrun differential-decay operationalization.

• Imre Galambos, 'Dunhuang characters and the dating of manuscripts' (and his note on taboo characters in Dunhuang Buddhist manuscripts) — Bihui as a dating instrument and the text-class variation in observance (court sutras under-observe) -- grounds and partly strains the item's mechanism
• International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) images/catalogue of dated Dunhuang documents and dated sutra copies; Giles's dated catalogue of the Stein collection — The kill dataset; stroke-omission is directly visible and item class is indexable

Predictions

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