Genres err through different organs

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)

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century France copied both chansons de geste, which lived simultaneously in memory and on parchment, and prose romances, which were born textual. The surprising connection is that the two genres should err through different organs even inside the same scriptoria: chanson witnesses varying by ear and memory (homophone spellings, synonym and formula substitutions that keep the meter), romances by eye (letter confusion, eyeskip). Scribes made it so involuntarily — a copyist who knows the song hears the exemplar in his head and reproduces sense-and-sound, while one who does not must track the letters. If this holds, 'scribal corruption' in oral-adjacent genres re-describes as memorial transmission by literate carriers, and the ear/eye variant ratio dates when a tradition's copyists stopped knowing it by heart.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Classify variants across collated witnesses as aurally/memorially explicable or visually explicable. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: in chansons de geste the aural/memorial class outnumbers the visual class by at least 1.5 to 1, while in prose romances of the same century the ratio is at most 1 to 1.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Jonas, the IRHT database of medieval French and Occitan texts: its witness census for chansons de geste and prose romances, worked through published collations and digitized witnesses of both genres.

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 from internal knowledge with zero tool use and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Duggan's formulaic analysis and the mouvance literature already attribute chanson de geste witness variation to memorial/reformulating transmission by carriers who knew the songs, anticipating the mechanism; the controlled two-genre ear/eye variant-ratio comparison against same-century prose romances is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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