Did Andreas Jäger or Georg Caspar Kirchmaier write the dissertation <i>De lingua vetustissima Europae</i> (1686)?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary This paper attempts to establish the authorship of a milestone in the development of the concept of the Indo-European language family, the dissertation De lingua vetustissima Europae (Wittenberg, 1686). Since the work of G. J. Metcalf in 1966 and 1974, this dissertation has been ascribed to Andreas Jäger (c.1660–1730), the Swedish student who played the part of respondens in the public disputation in which the dissertation was discussed. The paper sets out the arguments for identifying Georg Caspar Kirchmaier, the praeses in that disputation, as at least the collaborative author of the De lingua vetustissima. It examines a crucial mistaken argument of Metcalf’s, shows that it was usual in the late 17th and early 18th centuries for the praeses to write such a dissertation alone or in collaboration with the respondens, discusses the testimony of contemporaries in this particular case, and remarks on the relationship of the dissertation to Kirchmaier’s own scholarly interests.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".