Every source answers for its layers
7 August 2026 · Nabu news
The lect layer earned its “core” status by having answers on file:
every source declares what it claims, honest ignorance included. This
phase extends that discipline to three more layers. One consolidated
posture record now holds, for all 77 passage-serving sources, a
ruled answer on four axes — lect, dating, places, script — with
undatable, unplaced and implied as first-class honest answers,
and the test suite refusing any source that goes silent. A new front
door, nabu layer suggest, reports what a source declares beside what
its upstream carries but doesn’t yet serve: date-shaped metadata on
undated documents, gazetteer URLs on unlinked ones, script suffixes
with a byte-check verdict on what the held surface actually is.
The script axis went from grammar to live projection. Twenty-seven
codemap rows — every one byte-verified against the held passages
before earning its line — plus a handful of per-source rulings now
mint 3,424 ~script claims, so the slices are real queries:
--lect sga~ogam returns Old Irish as the ogham stones render it,
in actual Ogham codepoints. Where a code’s suffix names the
artifact’s script rather than the page’s — the Demotic ostraca held
as Latin transliteration, the Old Italic inscriptions held romanized —
the claim splits honestly: the lect id says egy~latn (what you will
read), and a new artifact-script field says egyd (what the scribe
wrote). One catalog even repaired itself on the way through: eight
Gaulish passages carrying a truncated xtg-Lat tag, upstream’s typo
beside its own correct xtg-Latn, normalized with the offending file
pinned as a regression fixture.
Two standing audits close the loop. The script check re-runs the
byte-census forever: any ~script claim whose sampled passages
classify to a different writing system is flagged loudly — a claim
that can be checked is a claim that stays true. And the places
analogue — gazetteer refs that no longer resolve against the local
index — caught twelve genuinely dangling references on its first
live run, malformed upstream ids that had sat unnoticed in two
hundred thousand rows. That is the whole argument for the layer
discipline, in one health line.