The dying language hides in the contract

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)

When an oasis switches language — Sogdian giving way to Uyghur at Turfan, Khotanese fading around Khotan and Dunhuang — the switch is usually dated from religious literature. This conjecture says religion is the wrong clock: legal genres conserve a receding language longest, because a contract's enforceability hangs on precedent, seals, and courts that change more slowly than congregations, and parties dare not experiment with the wording that protects their property. Letters sit in the middle; scripture and popular religious texts convert first, since missionary genres chase audiences. If this holds, the last dated document of any Silk Road language should overwhelmingly be a legal instrument, and the received language-death dates across the region all need revising upward.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each receding language with dated documents at Turfan and Dunhuang (Sogdian and Khotanese as the test cases), documents falling in the final quartile of that language's dated range are majority legal or contractual (over 50%), against a whole-corpus legal share far below that. Primary clause: the over-50% legal share in the final quartile, pooled across the two languages; the verdict follows the pooled result.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Dated-document genre metadata in the Digitales Turfan-Archiv and IDP for Sogdian and Khotanese items.

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 with no file reads, web access, or database queries; all context was inline in the launching prompt.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Domain-contraction in language death is textbook sociolinguistics, and the late Khotanese corpus (latest dated document 999 CE) is known to include economic, legal and official material; the specific final-quartile-majority-legal test pooled over Sogdian and Khotanese has not been run.

Khotan iv-v. The Khotanese Language (Encyclopaedia Iranica; latest dated document Tianxing 14 = 999 CE)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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