The ledger taught the poem to code-switch

Status: Anticipated · untested

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)

Macaronic poetry — verse that switches between English, French, and Latin mid-line — flourishes in late medieval England and is usually read as learned play or preaching technique. This conjecture ties it to a duller, stronger cause: trilingual bookkeeping. The clerks who kept accounts and drafted writs switched languages within single documents as a daily professional habit, and macaronic verse is that habit set to meter — which is why it should appear in the books such men owned, alongside their accounts, memoranda, and formularies, rather than in aristocratic literary anthologies. Code-switching was an occupational skill before it was an aesthetic. If this holds, the social home of macaronic lyric is the counting house, and its chronology should track the documented trilingualism of English administration rather than any literary fashion.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In the Digital Index of Middle English Verse, the share of macaronic items whose carrier manuscripts also contain documentary, legal, or account material will be at least twice the corresponding share for monolingual English lyrics of the same period; primary clause: that twofold carrier-profile gap. Secondary: macaronic items per decade will peak in the half-century of maximal trilingual record-keeping (c. 1350-1400) and decline as English monolingualizes administration.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: DIMEV language and manuscript fields, cross-referenced with the Index of Middle English Prose fascicules for carrier-manuscript contents.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Blind fresh claude-fable-5 subagent (max effort), single-Write discipline, 2026-07-09. W07, first wave of the operator-directed medieval-European block (W07-W10).

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Searched macaronic verse and trilingual clerical/business writing. Schendl and Wright explicitly connect literary code-switching with mixed-language business writing and accounts, anticipating the mechanism, but the DIMEV carrier-manuscript profile comparison is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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