Repository path: workshop/regimes/R48-rhyme-first.md · rendered 2026-09-09

R48 — the rhyme first: make the artifact three published hands declined to make

v0.1, pilot. R43 was an instrument: it asked at how many of an author's prose rhymes a chime is reachable by a hand that must take the ordinary rendering of both bearers or take nothing. On al-Ḥarīrī's first Assembly it answered: 33 chimes in 65 loci, of which 4 are full English rhymes and 27 are the -ing / -ness suffix accident.

R48 asks a different question, and it is the one the published record has an opinion about. Chappelow 1767 and Preston 1850 both print a refusal to carry the rhyme, and both give a reason about the reader — English rhymed prose is "a piece of pedantry", it "introduces an air of flippancy". Neither reason has ever been tested, because nobody made the object it is a reason about. R48 makes it.

The rule

1. Prose stays prose; verse stays verse — R43 rule 1, carried over unchanged and for the same instrument reason.
2. Render the sense. This clause outranks 3, 4 and 5. No fact, event, referent or evaluation added; nothing dropped. A chime bought with a word the source has not got is a refusal, not a chime. This is R43 rule 2 verbatim, and it is what keeps an R48 rendering and its R49 de-chime comparable.
3. At every frozen prose saj' locus, deliver a chime if rule 2 permits one — and the hand is released from R43 rule 3. It may take a less ordinary but still faithful word, invert a clause, choose a different but equally exact idiom, and lengthen or shorten a colon. What it may not do is change what the colon says.
4. The chime is delivered at the colon end, because that is where a reader hears it and that is what saj' is. Where the colon-end word is not the word rendering the Arabic rhyme-bearer, the locus is graded CHIME-RELOCATED and both the bearer alignment and the colon-end pair are logged. R43 graded bearer-to-bearer only; that grading is still reported here, beside the colon-end grading, and where they disagree both stand.
5. Run depth is not attempted beyond three unless it falls out for nothing (R42 rule 4).
6. Every locus is graded and every refusal is quoted, exactly as R43 rule 4: TAKEN / AVAILABLE-REFUSED / UNAVAILABLE, with the ground given.
7. Freeze before evaluation. The log is frozen and committed before any evaluation of the rendering is designed.

What R48 is not

It is not a recommendation. Whether a translator should do this is exactly what there is no evidence about, which is why the regime exists. R48 is the treatment arm of an experiment, and its companion R49 is the control; a reader who takes either as advice has read the wrong page.