The lect layer goes load-bearing — 408,884 stage assignments

4 August 2026 · Nabu news

A week ago the nabu-lects registry gave the library a vocabulary for historical language stages — lat:med, akk:ob, grc:koi — and a read seam that resolved codes through it. This phase makes the vocabulary load-bearing: 408,884 journaled stage assignments (4 August 2026), derived from evidence the catalog already held and stored in a journal that survives rebuilds, rides backups, and states its basis on every row.

Three grains of evidence, in the order they were ruled:

Period labels (279,000 assignments): a CDLI or eBL tablet labeled Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC) IS Old Babylonian — the ratified rules compile the catalog’s period facets into akk:ob, the Ur III bureaucracy into sux:ur3 (111,871 documents), AES corpus slices into Old and Middle Egyptian, DCS Vedic school tags into san:ved. Ambiguous labels (ED IIIb ; Old Akkadian) match nothing and stay honestly bare — every unmatched value is listed in the compile report.
Dates × stage bands (130,000 assignments): an EDR or EDH inscription whose dating interval sits inside exactly one stage’s band carries that stage — containment, never overlap, so a stone dated across a boundary stays unstaged. Latin epigraphy, unstaged at collection grain by deliberate ruling, is now staged per inscription: Classical Latin holds 88,342 documents.
Hand rulings: single-document refinements through nabu lect assign, which no rule may ever overwrite.

The registry itself grew to meet the corpus: Sumerian minted its five-stage ladder, proto-cuneiform (qpc) became its own anchor with the field’s genuinely open language-identity question stated in its note rather than decided, and Akkadian gained the Assyriological six-way Old/Middle/Neo × Assyrian/Babylonian grid.

Honesty machinery shipped alongside: nabu lect check-dates audits every assignment against its document’s own dates. On the very first live run it caught one — an inscription whose extracted dating interval ran backwards had slipped through containment — and the inference now refuses reversed intervals outright. The resolved stage is an ordinary document facet, so show prints it, search --lect filters by it at any grain, and every nabu language card ends with a live stage ladder.