The notary translates word for word

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)

Twelfth-century Greek-to-Latin translators are notorious for slavish word-by-word literalism, usually blamed on incompetence or philosophical caution. This conjecture reads literalism as a professional signature: the translators who calqued Greek word order (Burgundio of Pisa, James of Venice) were judges and notaries, men whose day job made textual fidelity a legally performable virtue — a translation was an authenticated copy, and word order was its seal — while translators from court and school milieus (Henricus Aristippus in Sicily) allowed themselves rhetorical freedom because their patrons were buying eloquence, not instruments. Style tracked the translator's profession, not his Greek. If this holds, the medieval reputation of translated Aristotle as barbarous Latin is the sound of notarial culture guaranteeing authenticity, and profession should predict literalism better than date, region, or subject matter.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

On matched prose samples, the rate of retained Greek word order (per finite clause) will be at least 15 percentage points higher in Burgundio's Damascenus and James of Venice's Posterior Analytics than in Aristippus's Meno and Phaedo; primary clause: across at least six translator-career pairs of the twelfth century, documented notarial/judicial profession predicts higher word-order retention with no exceptions among the clearly attested professionals.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Aristoteles Latinus apparatus volumes, Buytaert's edition of Burgundio's De fide orthodoxa, and the Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi editions of Aristippus, aligned against the Greek.

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 twelfth-century Greek-Latin translators' literalism and professions. Burgundio's career as judge and his de-verbo-ad-verbum method are both documented (the pairing goes back to Classen's Burgundio von Pisa: Richter, Gesandter, Übersetzer), but the quantified word-order-retention comparison across translators by profession is un-run.

Burgundio of Pisa (jurist-judge; literal translator of Damascenus, Galen, Chrysostom)
P. Classen, Burgundio von Pisa: Richter - Gesandter - Übersetzer (1974)

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