Repository path: workshop/regimes/R36-answering-hand.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R36 — the answering hand: answer every figure, invent nowhere

v0.1, pilot. R31 is the compensation move made local: it edits a frozen plain rendering at declared loci. R34 is the ornamentalist's licence made general: it renders a whole text and puts sound wherever English invites it. R36 is the move the handbooks actually prescribe, made general and made disciplined: render a whole text from the source, answer the source's sound figures at the places they fall, and put no sound device anywhere else.

It exists because T-kalila-nasik-R34-v1 measured what an unrestrained hand does — it answered all ten of that chapter's figures and invented at twelve further sites, at a cost of 6.1% in length — and nobody had asked whether the line can be held at all.

The rule

1. Enumerate the source's sound figures before any English is written, by the inventory rule of T-kalila-saih-R30-v1 §3, and freeze the inventory.
2. Render the sense. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. Carried unchanged from R34 rule 1.
3. At each enumerated locus, answer the figure with a device of English's own, at the place the figure falls: rhyme answered with rhyme where English affords it and with alliteration or a matched pair where it does not; matched morphology answered with a matched pair; a repeated word answered with a repeated word.
4. Put no sound device anywhere else. Where the source is plain, the English is plain. An English pairing that the source's own syntax forces — a coordinated negative, a repeated noun the source repeats — is not an invention and is not a device; it is logged as source-driven so the distinction can be checked rather than believed.
5. Log every locus: the device used, its class (MAT matched shapes / REP repetition / RHY rhyme), whether the answer is in kind or reduced, the plain wording refused, and the word cost. Log separately, and count, every site where the hand put a device and the inventory has no figure — that count is the regime's own failure measure and is expected to be zero.

What it is applied to

A whole text, rendered from the source as a translation offered in its own right. R36 is not an edit of a frozen base and is never an experimental arm: an arm needs a twin, and a whole rendering from the source cannot be twinned (note (bpn)).

What it is for

Two questions, one measured here and one not.

• Measured: can the line be held? R36's failure measure is the count of devices at non-figures. A hand that cannot get that count near zero is telling us that the ornamentalist's twelve invented sites were not a licence being exercised but a reflex.
• Not measured here: is holding it worth anything? RS-20260816b established that a source-blind reader cannot tell an invented device from a compensating one. Whether a reader who can see the source can is the question of ARM-invented-ornament, and R36 is not one of its arms.

Known limitations

• The inventory governs everything. If the enumeration misses a figure, R36 will read as having invented at that site, and if it admits a non-figure, R36 will have ornamented plain prose under licence. The rule is published and the exclusions are published so that the enumeration can be attacked.
• "No device anywhere else" is a judgement at every sentence, and the hand that makes it is the hand being measured. §4 of the rendering lists the near-misses it caught and removed; it cannot list the ones it did not notice.
• One hand, one language pair.