One Sanskrit, two pipelines

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)

Old Javanese famously absorbed an enormous Sanskrit loan vocabulary into its poetry, while Javanese courts simultaneously issued charters studded with Sanskrit legal formulas — and the standard picture treats both as one bilingual 'Sanskrit cosmopolis.' The conjecture splits it: these were two separate transmission channels that barely touched, a poetic-scholastic pipeline of imported literary manuscripts feeding the kakawin lexicon, and a chancery pipeline of formularies feeding the charters, run by different professions trained on different texts. The mechanism is occupational — poets and clerks each reproduce the Sanskrit of their own training materials — so each register should carry Sanskrit vocabulary the other simply lacks. If it holds, the unified cosmopolis dissolves into two thin professional conduits, and the genre composition of the lost manuscript imports becomes inferable from which words arrived by which pipe.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Using the Old Javanese lexicon with its source attributions, at least 60% of Sanskrit-derived lemmata that are frequent in kakawin poetry will lack any attestation in the epigraphic/chancery register, and conversely the most frequent charter Sanskrit formula-vocabulary will be significantly underrepresented in kakawin relative to its epigraphic frequency. Primary clause: the at-least-60% non-overlap of frequent poetic Sanskrit loans with the chancery register; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The SEAlang Library Old Javanese text and dictionary resources: lemma-level register comparison using the dictionary's poetic versus epigraphic source attributions.

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

Zoetmulder's OJED (~12,500 Sanskrit-derived entries with source attributions) makes the register comparison possible and the poetic/chancery register distinction is a commonplace, but no lemma-level quantification of the non-overlap between kakawin Sanskrit and epigraphic formula Sanskrit has been located. Exact operationalization un-run.

Zoetmulder 1982, Old Javanese-English Dictionary (12,500 Sanskrit loans; see Old Javanese overview)

Predictions

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