The dial quotes its textbook

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)

Medieval sundials carry engraved hour-lines and hour labels, and computus manuals — the church's timekeeping textbooks — supplied the vocabulary. The surprising connection is that dial epigraphy tracks textbook succession: when a new computus text achieves dominance in a region's schools, the terminology cut into stone changes within about a generation, because the mason copies the words his clerical client learned. Stone thus becomes a dated, placed proxy for the diffusion of specific computus texts — evidence the undated incipit databases cannot supply on their own. If this holds, sundial corpora can date the arrival of named computus works region by region, welding epigraphy to the incipit record.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For regions where eTK incipit counts show a given computus text achieving majority share among dated witnesses by year X, dials carved after X in that region will carry that text's characteristic hour-terminology at a rate at least three times that of dials carved before X. Primary clause: the threefold before/after contrast; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

eTK computus incipit records with datable witnesses, cross-dated against published corpora of surviving inscribed sundials (non-codex evidence) in addition.

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

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use of any kind; the packet was generated entirely from the model's own knowledge and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Dial epigraphy reflecting learned timekeeping vocabulary is documented (Old English tīd terminology on tide dials, canonical-hour labels on mass dials), but coupling dial inscriptions to the regional succession of specific computus texts dated via eTK incipit shares — stone as a diffusion proxy for named textbooks — is unproposed and un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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