Oral-formulaic performance and transmission
Oral epic and song were composed in performance — regenerated live from formulas, melodic cadences, and story-grammar — and everything we hold of them is a precipitate: texts written down mid-tradition, prose reworkings made for readers, songbook versions memorized by later singers, biographical wrappers packed around lyrics when they entered books. The South Slavic recordings of Parry and Lord supply the one directly observed control on what performance does to a text, which is why this subject crosses the print boundary. The defining lacuna is the performance itself: the warm-up, the tune, the audience, and the enacted voices survive only as statistical fossils in the written residue.
Emergent lineage
Related pages, connected by this project's own research.
Related Pages
Other pages that share linked material with this one.
Record claim
About the production, transmission, survival, or filtering of the written/material record up to the pre-modern past itself -- scribal behaviour and e…
Published editions
critical and documentary print editions used as countable data (Meersseman, Glorieux, MGH, Kaeppeli, Schwartz's Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, and o…
Not yet built
none -- no adequate existing dataset; the kill test requires new collection or fieldwork.
Digitized texts
digitized full-text corpora used as countable data -- OpenITI/KITAB, ROMTEXT, and similar digitized-text projects. New A2 family.
World claim
About the pre-print world outside the writing system itself -- trade, wages, politics, language, social structure, non-book craft; the written/materi…
Critical apparatus
genuine variant/apparatus data at scale -- Homeric papyri, Gandhari scrolls, epic recensions, Parry-Lord recordings. V2 narrows this family to true v…
Channel dissociation
Two transmission channels for the same content predicted to carry opposite statistical signatures, including error-spectrum forensics (diagnosing the…
Union catalogues
manuscript union catalogues and microfilm/digitization censuses (vHMML, EMML, NGMPP/Nepal, NCC, Kanjur databases, national catalogues).
Open conjectures — noetic, untested
Falsifiable questions posed below the evidence boundary by the 1001 Conjectures project. They are leads, not evidence, and carry no weight in this page's assessment.
- Two nets in one river Already answered
- A chronicle with no first copy Anticipated in print · untested
- A thousand paths narrow to the coasts Anticipated in print · untested
- Fluent chant, dead reading Anticipated in print · untested
- The Kumulipo files its species by sound Anticipated in print · untested
- The lullaby is the library Anticipated in print · untested
From the One Thousand and One Conjectures. They carry no evidential weight here; verdicts and credits live on each conjecture's own page.