The anthology is a core sample of a drowned literature

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)

Subhāṣita anthologies — the medieval collections of quotable verses — sampled the poetry of their day the way a sediment core samples a vanished lake: verse by verse, with attributions, from whatever was circulating. Because the anthologist sampled circulation while the recopying treadmill sampled curriculum, the two filters differ, and the fraction of anthology verses now untraceable to any surviving work directly measures how much circulating kāvya the treadmill dropped. This turns anthologies from quarries for pretty verses into loss-rate instruments with computable error bars. If it holds, poets known only from anthologies are not curiosities but the statistically expected majority of their profession, and courtly literary culture was several times larger than the extant canon implies.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For the major verse anthologies available in the SARIT corpus, more than half of attributed verses will be untraceable to any work extant in the NGMPP/NGMCP or Cambridge Sanskrit Manuscripts Project catalogues, and more than a third of named poets will be absent from the Pandit database as authors of any surviving work. Primary clause: the untraceable-verse fraction exceeds one half; the poet-absence fraction is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Verse-level tracing of anthologies in the SARIT e-text corpus against extant works, with poet identities checked in the Pandit database and extancy in the NGMPP/NGMCP and Cambridge Sanskrit Manuscripts Project catalogues.

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

Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Subhāṣita anthologies' preservation of otherwise-lost poets is a commonplace (Ingalls on Vidyākara), but using the untraceable-verse fraction (>1/2) and poet-absence fraction as a quantitative loss-rate instrument for circulating kāvya is un-run.

Ingalls (tr.), 'An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara's Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa' (1965)
'Subhashita' (Wikipedia) — anthologies preserve otherwise-unknown poets

Predictions

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