Teika collapses the spelling

Claim (verbatim)

Teika collapses the spelling. Before Teika, kana orthography floated — one word, many spellings, the scribe's ear deciding. Teika's kanazukai, joined to his authority as arbiter of the court canon, turned one-spelling-per-word into a lineage certificate: copying a Teika-line exemplar meant copying its orthography letter by letter, because the spelling itself authenticated the line. Dated Genji and waka manuscripts should therefore show an entropy collapse at the 13th-century recension boundary — a step, not a drift, and a step sharper in Teika-line copies than in the rival Kawachi line, where orthography carried less certifying weight.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For a fixed panel of high-frequency words with historically variable spellings, compute per-witness spelling entropy across pre-1200 fragments, Teika-line copies, and Kawachi-line copies of the same works. Primary clause (verdict follows it): mean spelling entropy of Teika-line copies is at least 50 percent below the pre-1200 fragments AND below date-matched Kawachi-line copies — the conjunction must hold. Secondary: deviations from Teika spellings inside Teika-line copies concentrate in words unattested in his surviving autograph exemplars.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the published multi-witness collation of the Genji monogatari taisei (Ikeda Kikan's apparatus) plus published facsimiles of the Oshima-bon and of Kawachi-line witnesses.

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 premise is textbook: with older pronunciations lost by his day, Fujiwara no Teika recovered and imposed a systematic kana orthography (Teika kanazukai) that held until the Meiji period, and his Aobyoshi-bon Genji recension stands against the rival Kawachi-bon line -- copying a Teika-line exemplar meant copying its orthography as a lineage mark. Not located: the item's specific ENTROPY-COLLAPSE measurement -- mean per-witness spelling entropy of Teika-line copies at least 50% below pre-1200 fragments AND below date-matched Kawachi-line copies (the conjunction required), a step rather than a drift, with deviations concentrated in words unattested in Teika's autographs. The standardization and the two lineages are established; the entropy-step and the Teika-vs-Kawachi contrast are unrun.

• Teika kanazukai (Fujiwara no Teika's systematic kana orthography) and the Aobyoshi-bon vs Kawachi-bon textual traditions of the Tale of Genji — Teika's orthographic standardization and the two Genji lineages -- the established datum the item quantifies
• The Genji monogatari taisei collation (Ikeda Kikan's apparatus) and published facsimiles of the Oshima-bon and Kawachi-line witnesses — The kill dataset for the per-witness spelling-entropy comparison

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.