The language layer

Names of people, places, and things — and the world’s language generally — are world knowledge, and world knowledge lives in one fabric (koan 10). A dialect is a claim about a linguistic zone of the world: its phonotactics, its name grammars, its name-part stock, every element carrying a gloss and a citation. A ratified name is canon. The language layer is therefore not a sibling tool bolted to the side of the fabric — it is packs in the fabric, under one semantics, statused and forkable like any other lore.

The consuming repo’s naming oracle splits along a principled seam rather than staying whole in the application: the half whose ground truth is a fact about the story’s world re-homes into the kernel as language packs and compile checks; the half whose ground truth is a fact about ours stays caller-side as a second screen. §3 draws that seam check by check.

1. Registers as declarations

Everything a dialect holds per linguistic zone becomes a pack, one-to-one — a residency change, not a redesign:

# grammar: v0 (unfrozen; AST normative)
scope camelot

dialect old-speech "the old speech"  proposed {
  basis attested "Old Welsh / Brythonic"       # an external-world claim — see §7
  vowels a e i o u y
  endings -a -oc -wen
  cluster-max 2
  stress penultimate
  name-kind person.given = given-proto given-deutero
  name-part myr "sea"           role given-proto    proposed
  name-part din "fastness"      role given-deutero  proposed
  }

Each name-part is world lore with provenance — a cited fact about a tongue, statused and forkable like any fact. The phonotactic frame (vowels, endings, foreign-cluster markers, cluster ceiling, stress) and the name-kind slot grammars are world facts too: they are what the composed surface form is checked against.

One thing does not migrate. The composition weights the consuming repo’s generator uses — how often to try a dithematic name versus a simple one — are proposal policy, not world fact. They describe how a generator should sample the space; they say nothing about what the tongue is. Weights stay caller-side with the generator that samples them.

2. Names as typed derivations

A name declaration cites its dialect and its composition, and “dialect-true” stops being a reviewer’s impression and becomes a compile verdict:

# grammar: v0 (unfrozen; AST normative)
scope camelot

name myrdin "Myrdin"  person.given in old-speech
  = given-proto myr + given-deutero din
  bearer the-enchanter   proposed
  # checked: the slot sequence matches a declared name-kind pattern; each
  # name-part exists in the dialect under the claimed role; the composed
  # surface form passes the dialect's phonotactics

Three obligations compile together on every name:

• Slot sequence. The sequence of name-part roles must match one of the dialect’s declared name-kind patterns. given-proto given-deutero is a legal person.given; a lone given-deutero is not.
• Role membership. Each cited name-part must exist in the named dialect under the role the name claims for it. A name-part declared place-generic cannot fill a given-proto slot.
• Phonotactics. The composed surface form must pass the dialect’s frame — its vowel inventory, cluster ceiling, ending set, and stress rule.

A name that fails any of the three does not compile. Register-fit is no longer a note a reviewer writes; it is a verdict the gate produces, and it speaks the domain rather than the parser (koan 9):

invalid: dialect-fit at name gwrthdin — cluster 'rthd' exceeds old-speech
         cluster-max 2; and 'given-proto given-deutero' takes exactly two
         name-parts, but three are cited. declared name-kinds for person.given:
         [given-proto given-deutero]

The failure names the dialect, the offending clusters, and the legal slot patterns — a writer meets a diagnosis in the world’s terms, not a stack trace.

3. The vet split, check by check

The criterion for what re-homes into the kernel is not deterministic-versus-LLM — several checks that stay caller-side are pure lookups. The criterion is whose world the ground truth is about:

A check re-homes into the kernel iff its ground truth is a fact about the story’s world. It stays in the application iff its ground truth is a fact about ours.

In-kernel — world-true:

Caller-side — world-safe:

Every caller-side screen carries no diegetic status, changes on research’s schedule rather than by ruling, can never be cited to a D-entry, and must never gate assertability. It is a second screen the consuming repo runs, not a condition on whether a name is canon.

Aural and set distinctness deserve a word, because they are the checks that most clearly could not run before the merge. The phonetic-key distance primitive ports from the oracle’s phonetics module as a pure kernel primitive: it maps a name to a phonetic key and measures distance between keys, so “these two names sound too alike” becomes a query over the name-space rather than an ear’s impression. Aural distinctness runs a candidate against the whole name-space; set distinctness runs it against a declared set (a scene cast, a family, a region). Scene-scoped checks can use a caller-supplied set of names.

Pronounceability splits down its middle. Cluster and syllable structure follow the dialect grammar and are checked in-kernel; a pronunciation heuristic for a particular production belongs to the caller.

Two-layer verdict composition. The oracle’s verdict becomes two-layered by design: a kernel verdict (world-true) and an external screen (world-safe). A consuming application composes them — it asks the kernel whether the name is true to the world and asks its own screens whether the name is safe in ours, and reports both. Neither layer can overrule the other’s ground truth, because they are ground truths about different worlds.

4. The lexicon

Diegetic terms are declarations with status and citations, and the allegory’s lexical bans are cited lexicon facts:

# grammar: v0 (unfrozen; AST normative)
scope camelot

term round-table "the Round Table"  decided d-0004

banned cannon d-0010 "the Matter of Britain keeps to sword and spear — no gunpowder anachronism"

The prose scanner stays a caller-side tool — scanning markdown is not world knowledge — but it consumes the compiled ban list instead of a private YAML, so there is one authoritative statement of what is banned and why, cited to the ruling that banned it. A ban is lore with provenance, not a config entry.

The language layer also feeds magic. A spoken-enchantment practice draws its primitives straight from it — merlins-craft’s true-names are dialect derivations checked in the speaker’s register (04-practices §4): magic consumes language through an ordinary reference rather than through a convention that lives in two places. One fabric means the magic layer reads the language layer, not a copy of it.

5. The agent-init flow

The data that seeds a dialect comes from LLM and agent interaction — and it is world lore, so it enters like world lore: as a proposal bundle under one hypothesis variable, every clause carrying agent provenance by inheritance. Agents author through the tool surface, the semantic tools against the deloreis server (DL-0014; 11-agent-authoring); the surface below is the materialized rendering of what those tools produced, reviewed as surface before it is committed. No agent hand-writes the AST, and no agent edits canon — the bundle enters proposed, awaiting a ruling in the consuming ledger.

# grammar: v0 (unfrozen; AST normative)
scope camelot

hypothesis h-old-loan "the old speech took a hero-name from the tongue over the water"

name-part tal "brow, high"  role given-proto  proposed agent:author/naming-run-0714  assumes h-old-loan
  # inventory, patterns, name-parts — every clause inherits the bundle's
  # hypothesis and the agent provenance

name taldin "Taldin"  person.given in old-speech
  = given-proto tal + given-deutero din
  proposed agent:author/naming-run-0714  assumes h-old-loan
  # support: H(h-old-loan) — merely-possible: visible to shadow queries,
  # structurally excluded from every context pack and every assertion

ratify d-0011 { h-old-loan := true }     # one valuation ratifies the bundle

One hypothesis variable per bundle means ratification is one authorial act for this language layer. A ratify assignment does not currently settle ordinary world claims; if a world claim assumes the same hypothesis, the check reports an error instead of silently leaving it open. The clause grain the annotation algebra already carries (02-semantics) gives partial ratification for free: ratify the dialect but reject two name-parts, and their variables valuate false — every name derived through them dies into lineage and lands in the killed-token dialect, per the standing kill discipline. Names composed from an unratified dialect are merely-possible by construction — no special case, just the same status-gating every proposed entity gets. A merely-possible name is visible to shadow queries and structurally excluded from every context pack and every assertion.

6. Name views

The compiled world is the name-space. A caller can derive the certain name view with deloreis query name --layer certain --json; the view is generated from the compiled world rather than maintained as a separate writable copy.

7. The attestation seam

basis attested "…" and per-name-part source URLs are claims about our world — “this pattern is Welsh-like,” “this root is on this reference page” — not about the story’s. They must not enter the annotation polynomials as if they were citations. Two rules bind at this seam, and 07-verdicts-and-llm-boundary designs the machinery that enforces them:

• Attestation grades never feed assertability. A dialect’s real-basis is an attestation (07 §3): stored, graded, replayable, and side-band on the checks that consume it — never a variable in a support polynomial. A name can never become certain because a model believes its basis is authentic.
• A dialect is ratifiable with its basis unverified. The author ratifies the sound — the phonotactics, the name-parts, the names that derive true to them — not the scholarship. basis attested may be unanswered, or answered no, and the dialect may still be ratified by a ruling. The scholarship is our-world evidence about the work; it is never support for the world.

This is the seam that keeps the language layer honest about which world each of its claims is about — the same distinction §3 draws for the vet, applied to the dialect’s own provenance.