Repository path: workshop/regimes/R42-declared-endrhyme.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R42 — the end-rhyme, declared: rhymed verse rendered with the degree of chime recorded at every bayt

v0.1, pilot. R41 made the handbook's synonym instruction auditable for rhymed prose. R42 is its counterpart for rhymed verse, and it exists because the prose regime's verdict vocabulary — CHIMED / AVAILABLE-REFUSED / NONE — cannot say the thing that matters in verse. In verse the interesting outcome is not did an echo happen but how close the echo was, because a translator of end-rhymed verse almost always gets something at the line-end and the whole question is whether the something counts.

So R42 grades. Its verdicts are FULL, SLANT, NONE, and they are assigned mechanically by tools/rhyme_pairs.py after the hand has written its own reading down — the hand may not overrule the dictionary, and where hand and dictionary disagree the disagreement is logged rather than resolved.

The rule

1. The unit is the bayt. Each Persian bayt is rendered as an English couplet, and the two line-final words of that couplet are the members. Where the source's rhyme falls across bayts (a qiṭ'a or ghazal run with monorhyme) rather than inside one, the members are the line-final words at the source's own rhyme positions, and the log says so.
2. Render the sense. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. This clause outranks 3, 4 and 5. A rhyme bought with a word the Persian has not got is a violation and is logged as a refusal, not as a chime. The commonest form of the violation in verse is the end-filler — and so, I say, at last, and away — and the log names every one it declined.
3. Enumerate before choosing. For each member, write the ordinary English renderings the hand would accept before looking for a pair among them. Same discipline as R41 rule 3, same reason.
4. Do not attempt the source's run length. Persian monorhyme routinely runs four bayts and more deep; English will not, and a hand that tries will pay for it in sense. The rule is: carry the rhyme in pairs at the source's rhyme positions, and record in the log how deep the source's run was and how deep the English got. That difference is data, not failure.
5. Grade every bayt, mechanically. After the couplet is written, the two members go to tools/rhyme_pairs.py: - FULL — the tool returns STRICT. - SLANT — the tool returns any NEAR class (N1/N2/N3), with the class recorded. - NONE — the tool returns NONE. The hand records its own reading alongside, before running the tool, in the same three words. Where they differ, both stand in the log. The hand does not revise its reading and does not revise the couplet to move the grade.
6. Record refusals. Where a chiming pair was reachable and was not used, quote the pair and give the ground — normally rule 2. A verse log that shows only what was taken is a log that flatters itself.
7. Freeze before evaluation. The log is frozen and committed before any evaluation of the rendering is designed (continue-prompt.md §5.4).

What R42 is not

It is not a claim that rhymed verse should be rendered in rhyme. That is a live question this project has not settled and R42 does not prejudge; the regime exists so that a hand which does rhyme leaves behind a record fine-grained enough to argue with. A companion regime that renders the same verse unrhymed would be the natural contrast subject and does not exist yet.

Provenance

Written 2026-08-22 (S212) for T-gulistan-R42-v1, the verse of Sa'di's «گلستان» دیباچه, whose prose was rendered the same day under R41. First use.