The bilingual half-life

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)

The inscriptions of Campā begin overwhelmingly in Sanskrit, pass through centuries of Sanskrit-Cham bilingualism, and end in Old Cham alone — a whole written language dying in public, on dated stones. The conjecture treats this as a measurable collapse with the dynamics of a market-share rout rather than a fashion: written Sanskrit should retreat register by register — losing transactional content first, then narrative, holding out longest in invocation and royal titulature — and its overall decline should follow a logistic curve, the signature of self-reinforcing abandonment in which each scribe trained without Sanskrit composition makes the next less likely to learn it. The mechanism is institutional: once chancery training dropped Sanskrit, no individual patron could buy it back. If it holds, the death of a classical written language becomes a predictable curve rather than an event, and the shape of the curve exposes the lost training institutions behind the corpus.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Ordering dated Cham inscriptions by śaka year, the Sanskrit share (of inscriptions overall, and of text volume within bilinguals) will fit a logistic decline significantly better than a linear one, and register retreat will be ordered: Sanskrit disappears from transactional and boundary content at least fifty years before it disappears from invocations and royal titulature. Primary clause: the logistic-over-linear fit of the decline; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā (Cham inscriptions, C-numbers): language-share and register time-series across the dated corpus.

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

The Sanskrit-to-Old-Cham shift across the dated Campa corpus is documented and dated (Sanskrit engraving ends c. 1253; ECIC XIII describes the corpus and its bilingualism), so the direction is anticipated; but no logistic-versus-linear curve fit or register-retreat ordering analysis has been published. Thin-field flag: the ECIC series is small and partly francophone.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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