Repository path: workshop/regimes/R37-declared-rule.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R37 — the declared-rule hand: two rules for the target set, both answered, each device tagged

v0.1, pilot. R36 renders a whole text answering every figure the source has and inventing nowhere. It presupposes what RS-20260816c showed is not given: that "the figures the source has" is a determinate list. On «باب الناسك والضيف» the project's frozen inventory and three readers of the Arabic picked out sets that agreed on 13 of 21 sites and on only 5 of the inventory's 10 figures, and the disagreement was three rules, not noise.

R37 is the instrument that makes the disagreement measurable in prose. It is not a recommendation; like R30 and R34 it is an arm of a manipulation.

The rule

1. Declare two rules for what counts as a sound figure, verbatim, before any English is written, and enumerate the source's figures twice, once under each. Freeze both inventories. - Rule A — the project's standing inventory rule, imported verbatim from T-kalila-saih-R30-v1 §3 and used at kalila-nasik and kalila-ibn-urs. - Rule B — the rule three readers of the Arabic applied at RS-20260816c §5, written out as a rule for the first time on the translation page that uses it.
2. Render the sense. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. Carried unchanged from R34 rule 1 and R36 rule 2.
3. Answer every locus in the union of the two sets, at the place it falls, in kind where English affords it and reduced where it does not — R36 rule 3, applied to the union.
4. Put no sound device at any place in neither set. R36 rule 4, unchanged. The restraint is what makes the census mean anything.
5. Tag every device with the rule that licenses it — BOTH, A-only, B-only — and record for every device the plain wording refused, so the rendering can be reduced mechanically to the Rule-A rendering or the Rule-B rendering after the fact.
6. Price each rule separately: the word cost of the A-only devices and of the B-only devices are reported apart, because the practical question a translator faces is what the choice of rule costs.

What it is for

Two things, neither of which is a recommendation to translate this way.

• It makes the indeterminacy a quantity in prose. How far apart the two rules are is not a fact about a census; it is the number of places in the English that would differ.
• It supplies within-site material for the study limb. Every device has its declared plain alternative at the same span, so the ornate and plain forms of each locus exist before any evaluation is designed.

Relation to the other regimes

Status

pilot. One rendering: T-kalila-labwa-R37-v1.