The stone is the backup

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)

Classical Khmer inscriptions are famously two-faced: Sanskrit verse hymning gods and kings, and Khmer prose listing rice-fields, servants, and boundaries. This conjecture says the Khmer half is not composition but transcription — extracts copied onto stone from working administrative documents on perishable media, the way a modern land registry publishes a notarized abstract: stone was the durable public backup, not the original instrument. The mechanism is legal need — donors wanted permanent notice of title, but the operative paperwork (royal orders, deeds, tax rolls) lived on palm-leaf — so the vernacular portions should betray their lost sources through extract-syntax: abrupt list openings, anaphora pointing to antecedents the stone never supplies, and explicit citations of prior orders and transactions, features a text composed for the stone itself would not need. This is a structurally-necessary claim about the vanished documentary layer, asserting nothing about any lost text's content. If it holds, Cambodia's perished paperwork becomes partially countable: every fossilized cross-reference on stone is a ghost with a tally mark.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In a systematic sample of Khmer-language portions across pre-Angkorian and Angkorian inscriptions, at least 30% will contain either an explicit reference to a non-epigraphic written instrument (royal order or decree, prior deed or ruling, register) or an unresolved anaphor or list-initial ellipsis whose antecedent is absent from the stone, while matched Sanskrit portions show such documentary deixis at under one-third that rate. Primary clause: the at-least-30% incidence in the vernacular portions; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Cœdès / DHARMA Khmer inscription inventory (K-numbers — the standard Khmer epigraphic corpus): systematic tagging of documentary deixis and extract-syntax in the Khmer-language versus Sanskrit portions.

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 by a fresh instance working only from the inline prompt, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That Khmer vernacular portions record legal acts whose operative paperwork lived on perishable media is standard doctrine (Vickery's pre-Angkor economic studies; universal acknowledgment that Angkor's palm-leaf administrative records are lost), but the extract-syntax operationalization — tagging documentary deixis and unresolved anaphora at a quantified 30% threshold against a Sanskrit control — is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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