Bilinguals mark the midpoint

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)

When a Christian community changes its language, it passes through a bilingual-manuscript phase — Greek-Arabic psalters at Sinai, Coptic-Arabic lectionaries in Egypt. The claim: the bilingual phase is not a long twilight but a sharp, predictable pulse — production of bilingual codices peaks roughly one generation before monolingual books in the new language overtake the old, in every tradition that made the transition. The mechanism is pedagogical: bilinguals are scaffolding built by the last generation that must teach the old language to a congregation that already thinks in the new one, and scaffolding goes up just before the weight transfers. If it holds, any community's language crossover can be dated from its bilingual peak alone, including communities whose transition no chronicle records.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause (verdict follows it): in the Sinai Melkite corpus, dated and datable Greek-Arabic bilingual manuscripts peak in the 9th century, and dated Arabic-only liturgical manuscripts overtake Greek-only production within 25-40 years of that peak. Secondary: the same 25-40 year lag fits the Coptic-Arabic bilingual peak against the 13th-14th century Arabic takeover.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

vHMML Reading Room language, date, and content metadata for the digitized Sinai Arabic, Sinai Greek, and Coptic collections (in-house).

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

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Provenance

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

Generated blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write from the inline prompt and existing-title list alone, with no file reads, web access, database queries, or any other tool call.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The Melkite Greek→Arabic transition and its bilingual manuscripts are well studied (Sinai corpus; Arabic became the Orthodox liturgical language around the turn of the 9th c.), but the lawlike claim — bilingual production peaks one generation before monolingual crossover, in every transitioning tradition — is an un-run cross-tradition test.

D. Galadza & A. Neroth van Vogelpoel, 'Multilingualism in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom Among the Melkites', ARAM 31 (2019)

Predictions

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