Three tongues, three addressees

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)

Christian Nubia wrote in Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian for some seven centuries, and the standard picture is chronological replacement — the classical church languages gradually yielding to the vernacular. This conjecture says language choice was instead governed by ADDRESSEE, stably, from early on: Greek for God (liturgy, epitaph prayers), Coptic for the church as institution and its Egyptian ties, Old Nubian for humans (letters, land sales, devotional reading) — a fixed division of labour, so that the genre-language matrix is nearly invariant over time and the apparent 'rise of Old Nubian' is mostly a change in WHAT got written (ever more documents) rather than substitution within genres. Medieval Nubia would then be not a nation slowly finding its voice but a society running three registers in parallel from the start. If it holds, every narrative of vernacular 'triumph' in Nubia mistakes a genre shift for a language shift, with obvious lessons for other multilingual manuscript cultures.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in DBMNT, decomposing the aggregate rise of Old Nubian between the periods 800-1000 and 1100-1400 into within-genre substitution versus change in genre composition, the composition term dominates, with within-genre language proportions for the major genres (epitaphs, legal documents, letters, liturgica) shifting by fewer than 20 percentage points. Killed if within-genre substitution is the dominant term — a genuine language shift.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

DBMNT — the Database of Medieval Nubian Texts, language and genre classifications with dates.

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 by a fresh claude-fable-5 instance in a single Write with no reads, web access, database queries, or other tool calls.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Ochala's qualitative-and-quantitative work on Nubian multilingualism explicitly establishes functional differentiation of Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian by domain, substantially anticipating the addressee-governed division of labour. The specific decomposition of the Old Nubian rise into genre-composition versus within-genre substitution terms was not located.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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