Sacred language ideology for Nomina Sacra between the second and fifth centuries CE
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study investigates the sacred language ideology behind Nomina Sacra, which are contractions of certain words in religious texts used to express awe towards the referent. This study analyzes 170 New Testament Manuscripts written from the second century to the fifth century CE. The macro analysis finds no evidence of a language policy even after the Edict of Milan (313 CE), when Christianity became a dominant religion within the Roman Empire. However, the meso and micro analyses unveil two factors that potentially contribute to variations in the employment of Nomina Sacra: (1) the meso context, linguistic ideologies cultivated and propagated by local churches, and (2) the micro context, individual scribes’ personal preferences for using Nomina Sacra. The research findings of the meso contexts demonstrate the indexical fields of Nomina Sacra – namely, a degree of strong and weak linguistic ideologies for their contractions’ referents – between the second to fifth century CE. In addition, a micro analysis shows individual scribes’ styles of applying Nomina Sacra, which were based on their perspectives on the sacred language ideologies.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it