rust-to-dust: draft imperial language design spec (r0)

Speech community and status ladder, phonology, stance/restraint marking,
meaning decomposition, and the packet fields the lowerer must provide.
Evidence and invention tagged throughout.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

settings/rust-to-dust/imperial/language-design.md

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+# Rust to Dust Imperial Language: Design Spec
+
+Status: **DRAFT r0.** First conlang project for Rust to Dust. Nothing here is
+canon until the operator rules on it.
+
+The language has no name. Its working slug is `rtd-imperial`. A name is owed
+and should come from the ontology and phonology below, as
+[setting.md](../setting.md) asks, not from an English label. Nothing here
+assigns one.
+
+## How To Read This
+
+Every claim carries a tag:
+
+- **[E]** evidence. The source material says it, and the file is cited.
+- **[I]** invention. This draft proposes it. The operator can overrule it, and
+  it is the part most worth attacking.
+- **[E→I]** an extension. The source gives a seed and this draft develops it.
+
+Sources read: everything under `settings/rust-to-dust/` (`README`, `setting`,
+`aliens`, `story`, `battle-royale`, `language-design`), the house method in
+`settings/eusocial-interbeing/language-design.md`, and Weksa's
+`docs/language-model.md`, `interlingua-standard.md`,
+`best-modern-approach.md`, `multilingual-utterance-lowering.md` and
+`schemas/interlingua-packet.md`. The stance design is read from the unmerged
+branch `weksa-lowering/speaker-state` (see Dependencies). The forge repos and
+Weksa `state/` and `docs/` hold no other Rust to Dust material: a forge search
+for the setting returned nothing outside Weksa. This draft therefore rests on
+about 440 lines of setting prose, and the invention share is large.
+
+## 1. Speech Community
+
+### Who speaks it [E]
+
+The empire's aliens: reptilian, scale-decorating, aesthetics-as-moral-truth,
+honor as devotion to aesthetic perfection in a chosen field (`aliens.md`). The
+empire is galaxy-spanning, so the language is a **network language**. Its
+community is defined by the imperial cultural network (media, prestige,
+commerce), not by a homeland. Humans are not native speakers. They meet it
+through subtitles, memes and broadcasts, and their contaminated English is a
+separate register (`language-design.md`, Registers).
+
+### Speech situations [E→I]
+
+`language-design.md` lists registers. This draft turns each into a situation
+with a speaker, an addressee and a stake, because a register is a relationship
+and not a vocabulary list:
+
+| Situation | Speaker → addressee | Stake | Source |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| Broadcast commentary | commentator → mass imperial audience, about a performer | rendering an aesthetic verdict in real time | E (battle-royale) |
+| High honor speech | warrior or master → rival, patron or witness | binding a vow, naming a performance | E (register list) |
+| Warrior discourse | practitioner ↔ practitioner of one field | form, discipline, challenge | E (register list) |
+| Commercial acquisition | buyer ↔ seller, or buyer → cultural object | access and integration phrased as uplift | E (setting: commerce as delivery rail) |
+| Panel-show media | host ↔ guest before an audience | turning the guest's stance into performance | E (story: the panel) |
+| Tourist admiration | tourist → anything | consuming a safe spectacle | E (aliens: tourists) |
+| Address to humans | any → human | uplift, fascination, appraisal | I |
+
+The last row is added. The story's central irony is that the empire
+understands the father's refusal better than he understands the empire, so
+how imperial speakers address humans is a design surface, not an afterthought.
+
+The first proving slice is **broadcast commentary** [E]: `battle-royale.md`
+names it as the runtime use, and it needs the fewest situations to be
+distinguishable by a reader.
+
+### Status ladder [I]
+
+The source gives status *signals* (scale decoration marks profession, class,
+rank, grief, celebrity, courtship, school, combat discipline, public
+obligation, commitments) and a *measure* (the more elaborate the decoration,
+the more visible the claim of virtue). It gives no ladder. The invention:
+status is two axes, not one.
+
+- **Field.** The discipline one is devoted to (combat, speech, hosting, trade,
+  politics, art). Honor is field-relative [E]. A master of one field has no
+  rank in another.
+- **Standing in the field**, by *claim and demonstrated constraint*, not by
+  force:
+  1. **Unclaimed.** No decoration in a field. This is shameless, not neutral
+     [E: unpainted = shamelessness].
+  2. **Claimant.** Decorated, undemonstrated. Tourists live here: the claim is
+     bought and the constraint never chosen [E: tourists buy a safe spectacle].
+  3. **Practitioner.** Decorated, with constraint demonstrated in the field.
+  4. **Master.** Constraint demonstrated before witnesses.
+  5. **Exemplar.** Master whose form others cite.
+- **Bare-by-claim** is an exceptional state off the ladder, not a step on it.
+  Going unpainted as an artistic claim that the performance alone is art is a
+  provocation [E]. The grammar must be able to say it without saying
+  "shameless".
+
+The language's address and agreement system tracks **claim versus
+demonstrated constraint**, because that is what the source treats as the
+moral measure. A tourist's loud, expensive decoration is a *mismatch* the
+language can state, and the language carries that mismatch in the grammar
+itself.
+
+Decoration is the primary status channel in the world. In speech it surfaces
+as address terms, honorific-like marking and metaphor (Section 4), not as a
+phoneme-level trick.
+
+## 2. Phonology (provisional)
+
+The source gives no phonetic profile. It poses the question
+(`language-design.md`, Open Questions) and says naming should follow from
+phonetics. House method (Zyphos) assigns Airawa hard dorsal and coronal
+edges and Sa'auei'a soft flow. This language must not collapse onto either
+[I].
+
+### Design stance [I]
+
+Three pressures from the source, turned into sound:
+
+1. **Aesthetic devotion**: the language should sound *composed*. Prosody is
+   deliberate, with controlled length, no clutter.
+2. **Chosen constraint is mastery**: constraint should be audible. Phonotactics
+   are *tight*, so that a speaker visibly refrains from the permitted-in-vulgar
+   alternatives.
+3. **Reptilian body** [E: reptilian]: the inventory leans on sustained
+   fricatives, hisses and trills that a non-human vocal tract makes easy. The
+   source does not specify a vocal tract. This is the weakest-evidenced
+   choice and a human-pronounceable romanization is therefore required.
+
+### Inventory (draft)
+
+- **Stops** (voiceless only): `t`, `k`, `ʔ`. No voiced stops. This separates it
+  from Airawa's `g d q`.
+- **Fricatives**: `s`, `ʃ`, `x`, `h`, with voiced `z`, `ʒ`. Fricatives
+  contrast in **length**: short and held. Held fricatives are the language's
+  main prosodic ornament and carry register weight (Section 3).
+- **Sonorants**: `n`, `m`, `l`, trilled `r`.
+- **Vowels**: `a`, `i`, `u`, `e`, each short or long. A long vowel is the
+  other register-bearing length.
+- **Syllables**: `(C)V(C)`, coda `s n l ʔ` only. No clusters. The absence of
+  clusters is the phonotactic form of "chosen constraint".
+
+### Prosody [I]
+
+- Stress and length are the speaker's expressive budget. In formal
+  registers, *less* length variation reads as more command of the form. A
+  commentator in broadcast register may spend length on a performer's
+  moment, and an honor-speech speaker withholds it. Restraint is therefore
+  audible without a phoneme change (Section 3).
+- Broadcast commentary has a lengthened, sibilant "announcer" delivery. Tourists
+  over-lengthen. Master speech under-lengthens.
+
+### Romanization and rendering [I]
+
+An ASCII romanization is owed before any lowering output is scored: the
+speaker-state lowering renders text, and the renderer for the audience needs
+a stable orthography. `ʃ ʒ x ʔ` need ASCII digraphs. The choice follows
+the Weksa pronunciation-lowering docs and belongs to a later cut.
+
+### Open
+
+- The inventory is a sketch, drawn from three pressures. It should be rerun
+  after at least a hundred roots exist, not defended.
+- The source calls for names to "emerge from ontology and phonetics". This
+  draft supplies phonetics, and the name waits for the first root set.
+
+## 3. Register, Status and Restraint: Stance Explicit
+
+### Weksa's constraint [E]
+
+On the unmerged `speaker-state` branch, `docs/interlingua-standard.md` adds
+a packet `stance`: **felt affect** (anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise,
+contempt, affection, shame, as grades) and **`restraint`**, how much of the
+felt affect is held back (0 none, 1000 fully). It is felt, never displayed.
+How a feeling shows and how much leaks is cultural; each language's ontology
+maps felt affect and restraint to its own register. A held-back feeling is not
+a claim, so it is never a predication.
+
+This language must therefore **mark stance explicitly in its own grammar**,
+and the marking is derived from the packet's `stance`, never from English
+register words in the source text.
+
+### Why this language is the hard case for restraint [E→I]
+
+For the empire, restraint is not suppression of a shameful interior. It is
+**the visible form of chosen constraint**, which is the moral proof of
+mastery [E]. So the map from `restraint` to surface is *inverted* relative to
+most human defaults:
+
+- High restraint is the *display* of virtue. A fully restrained speaker with
+  strong felt affect is exhibiting form.
+- Low restraint with strong affect is not honest. It is *vulgar* [E: "vulgar
+  violence as failed form"; "collapse into mere function"].
+- Zero affect is not neutrality. It can read as an absence of devotion.
+
+The deliberate consequence is that stance cannot be flattened to a politeness
+level. Two axes are needed, and the source's lens questions (elegant,
+disciplined, sincere, vulgar, memorable) ask for both.
+
+### Obligatory categories [I]
+
+Proposed grammatical commitments (the target-language selections that step 4
+of `language-model.md` demands). Each names the packet field that feeds it.
+
+1. **Finish marking** on predicates: an obligatory grade-class drawn from
+   `stance.restraint`, coarsened to a few classes. Working classes:
+   *raw*, *held*, *finished*. The unmarked form does not exist: leaving it
+   off is not neutrality but a gap that the community reads as vulgar.
+   Feeds from: `stance.restraint`.
+2. **Leak channel**: how much felt affect shows *through* a high-restraint
+   frame. Leak is not mapped to emotion words. It is mapped to **form
+   choices**: clipped versus full inflection, length spent on a fricative,
+   word choice within a field. This follows `speaker-state`'s own example
+   (anger leaking through clipped syntax is stance). Feeds from: felt affect
+   grades against `restraint`.
+3. **Standing agreement** on referents: field and standing-in-field of a
+   named performer, with the **claim/demonstrated** mismatch statable. Feeds
+   from: speaker and scene features (Section 6).
+4. **Witness and form-evaluation**. Broadcast commentary is evaluative by
+   situation. Evaluation is expressed as a **separate discourse layer**
+   (a particle or clause layer), not as adjectives in the content: the
+   lens questions [E] (elegant, disciplined, sincere, vulgar, memorable,
+   promising, mastery, collapse) are the layer's open slots. It is
+   kept apart from content because a held-back evaluation is not a claim
+   about the world, and the interlingua keeps content and attitude
+   separate. Feeds from: `discourse` features and the situation.
+5. **Evidential**: commentary asserts what the camera sees and *infers* the
+   performer's sincerity. The inference must be marked, because the source
+   puts sincerity in the performer, who is not the speaker and not available to
+   telemetry. Feeds from: the evidentiality feature the standard already
+   names.
+
+### Register is a function of three inputs [I]
+
+Register is not a setting on the speaker. It is selected from the pair
+(speaker's standing and community, scene relation to addressee and subject)
+and the situation, with stance as the final modulator. This is what
+`persona-drives-ontology` implies on the speaker-state branch and what the
+`language-ontology` cut will implement as deterministic selection
+`select(profile, stance, speaker, scene)`. This spec supplies the **content
+of that selection table** for this language; it does not write the table.
+
+Cases the table must cover first:
+
+| Case | Expected pull |
+|---|---|
+| Commentator, high restraint, strong approval of a restrained low-means act | finished marking; evaluative layer foregrounded; length withheld |
+| Commentator, low restraint, strong approval | raw marking; the speaker is performing delight. Only permitted in tourist-adjacent registers |
+| Master addressing rival | held or finished; address by field and standing |
+| Tourist, any affect | claimant standing; over-lengthened; evaluation layer present but misapplied |
+| Host to a human guest on a panel | warmth and appraisal mixed: affection plus contempt at high restraint is the *normal* pairing. The guest's rejection is absorbed as form |
+
+The last row is the story's turn written as a stance mapping, and is worth
+testing first: contempt and affection together, restrained, with the evaluation
+layer calling the rejection *sincere*.
+
+## 4. Meaning Before Surface
+
+The language is never produced by substituting English words with alien
+ones. The method is the Weksa path (`language-model.md`): packet, then
+ontology projection that can split, collapse or reweight concepts, then
+grammar commitments, morphology, phonology, surface.
+
+### Concept splits and collapses [E→I]
+
+The source names distinctions the language must make (`language-design.md`,
+Open Questions). Each is decomposed below into components so a lowerer can
+select a form from the packet's facts and not from a gloss.
+
+| Distinction | Decomposition (hypothesis) | Needs from the packet |
+|---|---|---|
+| **victory** vs **mastery** vs **spectacle** vs **vulgar overmatch** | victory: outcome of a contest. mastery: outcome *plus* demonstrated chosen constraint. spectacle: attention drawn, independent of constraint. vulgar overmatch: means exceed the opposing means with no constraint chosen. | outcome; each party's means; whether the means were chosen |
+| **crude** vs **failed** | crude: sincere, unrefined, with form attempted. failed: form collapsed into mere function. | actor's means and discipline as facts; the stance of the performer is not available, so the ontology reads from conduct |
+| **resistance** admired and absorbable | resistance read as: threat, folk art, breakout talent (`battle-royale.md` commentary list). Choice depends on whether it centers a performer or a practice. | performer-centered vs distributed agency |
+| **public spectacle** vs **living practice** [E] | spectacle: meaning lives in a central performer. practice: meaning lives in relationships. The empire reads distributed cooperation as noise or misattributes it to a performer. | number and relation of agents; presence of a focal agent |
+| **unpainted**, split | shame / danger / contempt / rawness / refusal / purity (the source lists these senses). Different surface forms: the sense is selected by relation and stance, not by a gloss. | decoration state, scene relation, speaker stance |
+
+### Scale decoration in grammar and metaphor [E→I]
+
+Decoration is the language's central metaphor domain [E: used for rank,
+grief, celebrity and more]. Proposed uses, to be tested not asserted:
+
+- **Address**: terms of address name a decoration claim ("the one marked for
+  ...") instead of a rank noun.
+- **Insult**: lack, mismatch or fraud of decoration (a claim not backed by
+  constraint). The strongest insult is the claimant who is also vulgar.
+- **Praise**: finish, as in a surface completed.
+- **Metaphor**: grief and obligation are *worn*. A human speaking of loss
+  reads, in this language, as a person visibly undecorated by it.
+
+The source does not say whether the language has these metaphors. They are
+the draft's strongest invention and the easiest to overrule.
+
+### Root families [I]
+
+House method: faint family resemblance, never a nametag. No roots are
+proposed here. The first root set should come from the field concepts
+(combat, speech, hosting, trade, art) and the constraint/finish axis, and
+should be minted against corpus items, not authored in a vacuum.
+
+### Contamination direction [E]
+
+What leaks into human English first (`language-design.md`) is an open
+question. [I] Candidates are evaluation-layer particles (the empire's form
+verdicts become meme tags) and the claim/finish vocabulary, because the
+story's kids absorb *prestige codes* first. The subtitle renderer is a
+separate target profile and not this spec's job.
+
+## 5. Evidence and Invention, Summarized
+
+**Evidence-backed (E):**
+- reptilian, aesthetic-honor, decoration-as-status speakers; unpainted as
+  profound shamelessness; unpainted-as-provocation for a rare few
+- mastery requires chosen constraint; overmatch and tourists are vulgar; the
+  lens questions
+- the empire is a network; commerce carries, culture conquers; the registers
+  listed
+- broadcast commentary and flavor-first subtitles as the runtime use
+- the packet has `stance` with felt affect and restraint; the ontology maps
+  them (speaker-state branch)
+
+**Invention (I):**
+- the two-axis status ladder and the claim/demonstrated-constraint mismatch
+- the whole phonological inventory and prosody
+- the five obligatory categories and the inverted restraint reading
+- the decoration-grammar and metaphor uses
+- the speech situations table, notably the address-to-humans row
+- the contempt-plus-affection panel pairing
+
+**Not settled in the source and left open:**
+- the language's and speakers' names; the vocal tract; whether the empire is
+  one language community or a family of dialects; whether non-reptilian
+  imperial subjects speak it and how it marks them
+
+## 6. What The Lowerer Must Provide
+
+Interlingua rule [E]: the packet carries neutral meaning plus source-side
+communicative pressure, and target-language concept splits belong
+downstream. The earlier Rust to Dust sketch in `language-design.md` puts an
+`aesthetic_reading` block (form, discipline, spectacle, honor status) **in
+the packet**. This draft recommends moving it: those are the *imperial
+ontology's reading* of neutral facts, so they belong in the ontology
+projection, and the packet carries the facts the reading is derived from.
+[I] This is a change to existing content and the operator should rule on it.
+
+Fields, in order of need. "Seed" means the standard's inventory already has
+a slot. "Gap" means the standard has no field yet; per the Promotion Rule,
+the gap is first an `rtd.*` extension and is promoted only after use in two
+real packets.
+
+| Need | Why | Status |
+|---|---|---|
+| `stance` with felt affect and `restraint` | the whole of Section 3 | seed (unmerged: `speaker-state`) |
+| **speaker** axes: field, standing in field, school or lineage, decoration state, community | status and register selection | seed slot `Speaker` (unmerged); the *values* are the gap |
+| **scene**: relative status of speaker, subject and audience; audience composition (imperial, tourist, human via subtitles) | register and address | seed slot `Scene` (unmerged) |
+| `medium` and `setting` ids for broadcast commentary | situation selection | seed (`context`) |
+| `instrument` role on predications, **for each party** | overmatch is derived from both parties' means | seed role |
+| **volition of the constraint**: chosen / compelled / unknown, as a predication feature | the line between mastery and mere lacking | gap (`rtd.` extension first) |
+| **ordering of means** (power or means gap) | vulgar overmatch | not a packet field: ontology-side order over concept ids, so the packet carries concepts and the ontology compares them |
+| referent **decoration state** (decorated / unpainted / bare-by-claim / not applicable) | status, insult, the human-undecorated reading | gap (`rtd.` extension first) |
+| referent **community** or `member_of` relation | tourist versus warrior; human versus imperial | seed relation `member_of`; community ids come from the `language-ontology` cut |
+| **focal agent** presence | spectacle versus living practice | derivable: a predication with plural or no agent role; not a new field |
+| `evidentiality` | witnessed versus inferred sincerity | seed feature (to confirm its option set) |
+| `polarity`, tense, aspect | ordinary | seed |
+| `preserve` | which nodes the commentary must keep | seed (`constraints`) |
+
+Fields the draft deliberately does **not** request: `aesthetic_reading`,
+`honor_status`, `spectacle_value` or any value judgment. The performer's
+sincerity is not telemetry, and the commentator infers it. These are
+outputs of the imperial ontology and must not be put into the packet by the
+client, or the client is deciding the language's concepts.
+
+## 7. Dependencies, Risks and Next Cuts
+
+**Dependencies.** Stance and the `Speaker` and `Scene` slots exist only on
+the `weksa-lowering/speaker-state` branch. The `language-ontology` cut
+(community and ontology-entry documents) is not landed. This spec states
+the content those cuts will hold, and does not substitute for them.
+
+**Risks.**
+- The inventory and the grammar are heavily invented on thin evidence. Mitigation:
+  tag everything (done) and test the five obligatory categories against the
+  lowerer before building roots.
+- The claim-versus-constraint ladder risks making the language a *status-code
+  detector*. The source's hold is that honor is devotion, not rank. Test:
+  can the grammar say a bare-by-claim performance without calling it low?
+- Draft collides with `language-design.md`'s packet-side `aesthetic_reading`.
+  Resolved by the recommendation in Section 6 if ruled.
+
+**Next cuts, in order.**
+1. Operator rulings on the forks below.
+2. A first corpus slice: ten broadcast-commentary utterances, each decomposed
+   to a packet (neutral facts plus stance), with the expected surface *category*
+   (finish class, evaluation layer) and no words yet.
+3. The selection table for Section 3's first five cases.
+4. A root set from the field concepts, and a naming brief for the language.
+5. An orthography and a pronunciation lowering.
+
+**Forks for the operator (recommendations given).**
+- Move `aesthetic_reading` out of the packet into the ontology. *Recommend:
+  yes.*
+- Is a two-axis status ladder right, or should honor be flat within a field?
+  *Recommend: two axes, because tourists need a place.*
+- Is inverted restraint (restraint as display of virtue) the intended reading?
+  *Recommend: yes, it follows from "chosen constraint is mastery".*
+- Is the vocal tract reptilian-literal or a human-stylized invention?
+  *Recommend: human-pronounceable stylization with length as ornament, so
+  the first corpus does not wait on phonetics.*