Repository path: workshop/regimes/R44-run-depth.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R44 — the rhyme goes where the source put it: run length is carried, not converted to couplets

v0.1, pilot. R42 rule 4 reads the rhyme is carried in pairs, never in runs — do not attempt the source's run length. That rule was written on 2026-08-22 as a deliberate simplification, and its own log recorded what it cost: six runs in the source; the deepest English run in the span is three, and at b073–b075 and b082–b083 it carries nothing. R43 carried the rule over unchanged.

R44 reverses it, and the reversal is the instrument. A قطعه holds one rhyme across a series of bayt-ends while the hemistichs between them go unrhymed; in English, with one line to a hemistich, that is a rhyme at every second line-end. The published tradition's answer is to rhyme each bayt within itself — couplets — which supplies more rhyme than the Persian has and puts none of it where the Persian put it. Under R44 the hand may not make that substitution. What that yields, and whether anybody hears the difference, is what ARM-run-depth measures.

The rule

1. The English rhyme goes where the Persian rhyme is, at the distance the Persian put it. - At a MATHNAWI bayt, the two English lines rhyme with each other. - At a QITA run of depth k, one English rhyme is held across the ends of all k bayts — English lines 2, 4, … 2k of the passage — and the odd lines are left unrhymed. - Converting a QITA run into couplets is forbidden, and so is rhyming an odd line in a QITA merely because a rhyme was to hand. This is an instrument constraint, declared as such; it is not a claim that the tradition's substitution is wrong.
2. Render the sense. This clause outranks 1, 3 and 4, exactly as in R41, R42 and R43. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. A rhyme bought with a word the Persian has not got is a refusal, not a rhyme — and under R44 this clause bears more weight than under any previous regime, because a four-member rhyme set is where a translator pads.
3. Enumerate before choosing, and write the enumeration down. At every rhyming position, write the ordinary English renderings the hand would accept on the sense alone, then look for the set. The enumeration goes into the log whether or not it yields.
4. Grade every passage with one of four verdicts, assigned to the passage as a whole: - HELD — the source's placement was carried at every position, within rule 2. - SHORT — the rhyme was held for fewer bayts than the source holds it; the depth reached is recorded, and so is the position where it broke. - REFUSED — a set was reachable and was not used, with the set quoted and the ground given (normally rule 2). - UNREACHABLE — the enumeration yielded no set at the required depth.
5. Grade every rhyming position mechanically with tools/rhyme_pairs.py, after the hand has written its own reading down, both standing where they differ — R42 rule 5, unchanged.
6. The hand does not revise a rendering to move a grade (R43 rule 6, unchanged). Rule 1 is about where the attempt is made; grades are read off whatever the sense produced there.
7. Prose stays prose and verse stays verse (R43 rule 1, unchanged), so that this regime differs from R43 in exactly one respect and the two spans stay comparable.
8. Freeze before evaluation. The log is frozen and committed before any published hand is opened for this span and before any evaluation is designed.

What R44 is not

It is not a recommendation to carry run length. Whether an English reader registers a rhyme held at every second line is the open question the regime exists to make testable; a regime cannot settle it by fiat, and if the answer is that nobody hears it, R44 will have been the instrument that established that its own instruction is not worth giving.