Weksa/schemas/target-language-cultural-ontology.md

Target-Language Cultural Ontology Contract

This is the human-facing schema receipt for target-language cultural ontology profiles consumed by Weksa utterance lowering.

Executable schema code does not exist yet. When it does, it must reconcile with this document and the profiles under data/target-language-ontology/.

Authority

A target-language cultural ontology profile owns the realization distinctions that must be inspected for a human target language before surface text is chosen.

It owns:

• address and treatment distinctions
• politeness and register pressure
• social stance and directness defaults
• idiom, metaphor, and lexical-locale risks
• script or orthographic choices that carry meaning
• forbidden flattenings for reviewed output

It does not own:

• source meaning
• speaker identity
• private state
• exhaustive grammar
• whole-culture description
• final wording without an interlingua packet

Required Fields

• profile_id: stable profile identifier.
• language: target code, locale, and script.
• scope: bounded statement of what the profile is and is not.
• authority: owns and does_not_own lists.
• salience_axes: named axes the lowerer must inspect.
• linguistic_affordances: optional nested typed feature records, following cultural-ontology-profile.md, when the profile owns dialect, register, phonological, lexical, discourse, orthographic, or code-switching pressure.
• forbidden_flattenings: mistakes the target lowerer must avoid.

Salience Axes

Each salience axis should name:

• relevant_distinctions: choices the target language or locale makes visible.
• lowering_questions: questions reviewers and lowerers should answer before accepting an output.

Examples:

• English directness and sarcasm.
• Brazilian Portuguese treatment choice, lexical locale, and regional or religious-cultural overlays.
• Japanese politeness, ellipsis, and sentence-final force.

Fixture Contract

Reviewed multilingual fixtures should cite the profile used by each realization:

target_language:
  code: pt
  locale: pt-BR
  script: Latn
  register: direct technical casual
  cultural_ontology_refs:
    - data/target-language-ontology/pt-BR.yaml

The realization trace should name the cultural ontology axes that shaped the line.

For dialectal, regional, historical, ritual, and contact-language profiles, use the nested weksa.cultural_ontology_profile.v0 contract in cultural-ontology-profile.md. Flat string lists are only summaries; typed feature records own accepted affordance detail.