Repository path: workshop/experiments/E-20260806-carrier-or-knowledge/materials/specifications.md · rendered 2026-09-09

The three specifications — frozen before any member was drafted (R19 Q7)

Committed 2026-08-06, S117, before a word of any rendering existed. The commit that carries this file precedes every commit carrying a rendering, and the verifier checks that ordering.

Source unit: Gogol, «Записки сумасшедшего», the entry Октября 3, first paragraph — 306 Russian words, 1,958 characters, materials/source.txt. Public domain (1834).

The declared carrier list

Six properties. Five are the ones wiki/goodness-senses.md §voice names as the observable carriers of a narratorial perspective; the sixth is the property RS-20260805d §4 found moving most and the entry does not name.

C — the baseline

MOVE: nothing. HOLD: not applicable.

Render the source unit faithfully and in one pass. Declared dialect: British English. Declared register point: unmarked / literary-contemporary (A-mchugh-presence), so that no member is separated from another by period orthography or by archaising. Every carrier K1–K6 sits wherever a close rendering puts it, and where it sits is what the other two members are measured against.

A — the five named carriers moved

MOVE: K1, K2, K3, K4, K5 — all five, together, as far as the propositions allow. HOLD: K6.

Concretely, and fixed here so the drafting cannot drift:

• K1 up: from unmarked to markedly formal, Latinate, official.
• K2 long: the baseline's short, broken, exclamatory sentences become long periodic ones with subordination; exclamations become clauses.
• K3 cool: concrete and bodily lexis gives way to abstract and general lexis wherever the proposition survives the change.
• K4 down: verbal tics, interjections and repetitions are regularised into standard prose.
• K5 far: the narrator stops leaning toward the reader; direct address and confiding asides become impersonal statement.

K6 is held. The man must understand exactly what he understands in C and no more. He still does not see that he is envious; he still believes the errand he is on is different in kind from the grasping he condemns in others; he still takes his position near the Director to be a distinction. Nothing he says may be marked as ironic, and no sentence may be added that lets him stand outside himself.

B — the omitted property moved

MOVE: K6 — the narrator now understands what he is revealing. HOLD: K1, K2, K3, K4, K5, each as near C as the change permits.

Concretely:

• K6 up: the man sees himself. He knows the resentment is resentment; he knows what his errand is; he knows what his little distinction is worth. He asserts the same things and stands outside them while he does.
• K1–K5 held: same unmarked register, same short broken exclamatory rhythm, same warm concrete lexis, same tics kept and no new ones invented, same nearness to the reader.

Parity (R19 Q5) binds hardest here. B asserts every proposition C asserts, including the ones a self-aware man would be embarrassed to assert. Irony is a relation to an assertion, not a withdrawal of it: where C states that the service is a noble one, B states it too.

The prediction the specifications do not contain

Registered separately in design.md §5 and deliberately not written into any specification above.