Bring the handoff package current through pull request 617

project/handoff/README.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # Phi continuation handoff
 
-This directory is the transfer package for continuing Phi after 17 July 2026. It was first assembled from the live repository after pull request #418 merged and is current through pull request #580 and the local book PDF assembled later on 24 July 2026. It records the current position, the working method, the tools, and the maintainer's standing instructions that are easy to lose when a conversation ends.
+This directory is the transfer package for continuing Phi after 17 July 2026. It was first assembled from the live repository after pull request #418 merged and is current through pull request #617 on 27 July 2026. It records the current position, the working method, the tools, and the maintainer's standing instructions that are easy to lose when a conversation ends.
 
 This package is a map, not a new authority. When anything here disagrees with a live source, follow the authority order in [`canon.md`](../../canon.md), repair this package, and record a language decision where the disagreement is substantive.
 
@@ -34,6 +34,12 @@ The writing system then consolidated. On 23 July 2026 the maintainer retired the
 
 PED-08 is complete. The book is published whole: the cold open, chapters 1 through 14, the close, and a consolidated bibliography, every file merged through its own reviewed pull request and rendered on the site. Post-merge citation audits are archived for chapters 3 through 5, 8 through 10, 12 through 14, and the close, and the planning treatment is archived at `archive/book_treatment.md`. The chapter method that produced the book binds any revision pass: a verification agent pins every source with verbatim quotes before drafting, author names and title lines come from Crossref at entry-writing time, repository receipts are checked by grep rather than recall, a list attributed to a source is treated as a quotation, the register follows the maintainer's hedging-low and warmth-high rulings recorded in [`language_and_voice.md`](language_and_voice.md), the full voice protocol runs with the counting pass, and an audit's own findings are verified before they are applied. The whole-book revision read of 22 July 2026 ran under that method as the first pass over the published whole: a front-to-back read logged findings at the moment of noticing, every finding was verified by grep before it reached the maintainer, and one reviewed pull request repaired all fourteen. That repair removed the chapter 2 and 6 Ring Verse duplication, corrected the primer facts in chapter 9 and a forward reference in chapter 10, thinned hedging to the once-per-book rule where it had crowded, and left every chapter reference byte-identical to its bibliography entry.
 
+The maintainer's own front-to-back read of the finished book followed on 27 July 2026, and everything it found belonged to one defect class: a statement that was true when written and quietly stopped being true when something else grew. The lexicon figure, the shelf's size, the primer's length, a riddle placed by a position it no longer held, an inventory that promised completeness. Nothing in the toolchain checks a number written in English about the repository, so his eye was the only instrument that could catch them. Six reviewed pull requests answered the read. The site's editorial configuration became documented rather than script-only, chapter 7's shelf account and chapter 8's lexicon figure came current, the taught-pattern inventory gained the eight patterns the primer had outgrown, the manual gave up its repository references, chapter 22's two false claims were corrected against the texts they cite, and the texts index dropped the Tengwar rendering that repeated every title before a reader had chosen one.
+
+That read also closed the conflation sweep's last open item. The weaver's shade of anxiousness in *News from Nowhere* chapter 3 had rendered its degree with the size adjective `thiku`; the maintainer ruled it attenuation, so `la` now lowers the anxiety and the look keeps its own shape.
+
+One assessment was delivered and declined in the same span. Nothing compares a Phi line quoted in the manual against the shelf text it names, which is how chapter 22's misquoted Metta Sutta line survived. A measurement found 14 exact quotations among 1,573 teaching-corpus Phi lines, and a prototype detector caught the real defect while flagging nine lines in all. The maintainer ruled it not worth building, since the manual is close to finished and future additions will be texts. Do not raise it again unprompted.
+
 No content or language work is commissioned. The book's title remains The Phi Book for now, by the maintainer's ruling, with *A Language You Cannot Hurry* and *Announce, Then Deliver* on record as candidates. The bibliography's citation style is uniform with DOIs intact, and the whole-book revision read is complete, so further revision waits on the maintainer's own reading of the finished book. The maintained future-work ledger has five unfinished entries, all named in [`current_state.md`](current_state.md) and [`project/deferred_questions.md`](../deferred_questions.md).
 
 ## The maintainer's working contract
@@ -62,6 +68,8 @@ The following habits came from direct maintainer corrections. Treat them as stan
 - Do not start a local web server for routine handoff or vocabulary work. Daniel connects to the Mac mini over SSH and cannot use a server bound only to that machine. Build the site, but leave it stopped unless a specific remote-access arrangement is requested.
 - Use one coherent pull request per completed effort. Pass every PR body with `--body-file`, never as an inline shell argument.
 - When Daniel reports that a PR has merged, perform the full local and remote branch cleanup without waiting for a second request.
+- The manual is a standalone document. Reader-facing manual text carries no repository paths, no vocabulary field names, and no tooling instructions, because a reader has never seen a stored entry and cannot open `documents/`, `vocabulary/`, `scripts/`, or canon from the website. Point only at what the site publishes: the lexicon, the primer, the short road, the book, the pamphlets, the texts, Part VII, the colophon. Where nothing published covers the point, drop the pointer and let the sentence carry its own claim.
+- Do not write an exact repository count into prose. Nothing checks it, so it goes stale silently and stays wrong for months. Use a round lower bound that survives growth, measure before writing even that, and keep an exact figure only where the arithmetic is the content. A number attached to a past event is a record: leave it alone or drop the number rather than renumbering the event.
 
 ## Package contents
 

project/handoff/current_state.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # Current state
 
-This snapshot was first assembled after pull request #418 merged on 17 July 2026 and is current through pull request #580 and the PDF reading copy assembled after it. It covers D055, the completed SEM-09D corpus retrofit, the finished book, and the practice-complete pamphlet shelf. It also records the writing-system consolidation that made Tengwar Phi's sole alternative to romanization, the four renderer-led shelf identities, and the complete entrance sequence for Kia, the Short Road, and the Phi Book contents page. Its counts describe the current tracked work; Git history remains the source for branch and merge identifiers.
+This snapshot was first assembled after pull request #418 merged on 17 July 2026 and is current through pull request #617 on 27 July 2026. It covers D055, the completed SEM-09D corpus retrofit, the finished book, and the practice-complete pamphlet shelf. It also records the writing-system consolidation that made Tengwar Phi's sole alternative to romanization, the four renderer-led shelf identities, and the complete entrance sequence for Kia, the Short Road, and the Phi Book contents page. Its counts describe the current tracked work; Git history remains the source for branch and merge identifiers.
 
 ## Active execution sequence
 
@@ -48,9 +48,9 @@ Kia opens the separate entrance-page sequence. Its first greeting sits in an ope
 
 | Inventory | Total | Target | Legacy |
 |---|---:|---:|---:|
-| Entire lexicon | 1,286 | 1,286 | 0 |
-| Content vocabulary | 1,152 | 1,152 | 0 |
-| Base content vocabulary | 891 | 891 | 0 |
+| Entire lexicon | 1,287 | 1,287 | 0 |
+| Content vocabulary | 1,153 | 1,153 | 0 |
+| Base content vocabulary | 892 | 892 | 0 |
 | Optional-module content vocabulary | 261 | 261 | 0 |
 | Function vocabulary | 114 | 114 | 0 |
 | Interjections | 20 | 20 | 0 |
@@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ All eight profiles already have canonical JSON membership, a generated module in
 
 ## Corpus state
 
-The literary shelf has completed its full inherited-text review against the current lexicon. It contains nine close translations, eleven transmutations, and one original Phi work; seven source works use both methods. *News from Nowhere* is one 32-chapter work with the first three chapters transmuted and reviewed. The current inherited-text review record is [`documents/evaluation/active_text_corpus_review.md`](../../documents/evaluation/active_text_corpus_review.md), while the original dialogue carries its proposition and vocabulary-pressure records in the work itself. The compound registry holds 76 rows at word-pair and word-triple scale by the maintainer's ruling of 23 July 2026: its one four-word entry overreached from compound toward canonized phrase, so `lothea korua`, love-heart, is registered in its place and `mawha norui` composes freely before it in the Metta Sutta's lines.
+The literary shelf has completed its full inherited-text review against the current lexicon. It holds seventeen works: nine include a close translation, eleven include a transmutation, four are original Phi compositions, and seven source works use both methods. *News from Nowhere* is one 32-chapter work with the first three chapters transmuted and reviewed. The current inherited-text review record is [`documents/evaluation/active_text_corpus_review.md`](../../documents/evaluation/active_text_corpus_review.md), while the original dialogue carries its proposition and vocabulary-pressure records in the work itself. The compound registry holds 76 rows at word-pair and word-triple scale by the maintainer's ruling of 23 July 2026: its one four-word entry overreached from compound toward canonized phrase, so `lothea korua`, love-heart, is registered in its place and `mawha norui` composes freely before it in the Metta Sutta's lines.
 
 SEM-09D is complete. Fifteen literary passes finished the shelf, and all three drafted *News from Nowhere* chapters are among them. All seven manual parts, all twenty-seven primer files, and the nine pamphlets then on the shelf are reviewed without a lexical gap, and the current-documents sweep closed with the evaluation corpus. Parts IV and VI each use one explicitly labelled optional term with a base alternative; Part VII teaches module words only inside their named learning paths, while the general primer and every pamphlet except source-material use no module terms; the source-material pamphlet demonstrates the module choice it teaches. A Phi passage changes only when the current form is more faithful or natural there. A transparent composition stays when its parts still teach or express the thought better, and every changed sentence and dependency receives validation.
 
@@ -123,6 +123,18 @@ The shelf's method distinction remains settled:
 - In an original, Phi is the source. English follows as a close reading, and the proposition record states what the work argues, revises, and leaves open.
 - Phi prefers transmutation for inherited material. Close translations show what the language can carry, while original work lets the language begin without a prior source.
 
+### News from Nowhere, chapter 4
+
+The maintainer intends chapter 4, "A Market by the Way", as the next transmutation. It is the shortest of the four so far, about 1,158 words of source against chapter 3's 1,293 rendered lines, and it is the gift economy's second test: a Victorian visitor walking through a market with no money in it.
+
+One precondition stands on file and is unsettled. The module-vocabulary ruling for this novel has never been made. The proposal on record is that the future people speak core vocabulary while the narrator's old-world descriptions may reach module words, which matters immediately in a market chapter. Settle it with the maintainer before drafting rather than after. The same note asks that chapters 1 through 3 be verified as having survived the four-syllable migration sweep, which has not been checked.
+
+Whoever takes the chapter should work from `.claude/skills/transmute/SKILL.md`, the transmutation guide written for models out of this novel's own chapter 1 failures. It applies to a single-line correction as much as to a chapter. Read all three existing chapters end to end first, not excerpts: the conventions are documented, but the register is only in the chapters.
+
+The settled conventions are these. Every block runs four lines, Phi, gloss, back-translation in parentheses, and a `morris:` line quoting exactly the clause that block transmutes, checked against the complete witness at `texts/news_from_nowhere/source.txt`. Each block group carries a Notes paragraph. The names are ratified and in use: `ne phemi` for the narrator, Guest; `ne kulo` for Dick; `ne selomi` for the weaver; `ne solai` for Boffin with `ne keruko` for his real name; `ne luwae` for Annie; `ne woru` for Jim. Morris's habit of sorting people by gender dissolves by rule, which is the largest deliberate loss in the book and was ratified as such. Coining is expected rather than rationed: the maintainer's standing instruction is a closer transmutation even when it costs more coinage, and four-syllable words are welcome for concepts that recur rarely.
+
+The build enforces its own contract. `site/news_from_nowhere_editorial.json` needs a chapter record whose declared counts match what the renderer finds, covering movements, opening paragraphs, interlinear blocks and stanzas, notes, tables, ledger rows, and inner dividers, and its chapter list must match the `chapter_*.md` glob exactly. The ladder in `texts/news_from_nowhere/README.md` gains a row. A chapter that renders without those in step stops the build.
+
 ## Book state
 
 The book is complete and published: the cold open, chapters 1 through 14, the close, and the consolidated bibliography, seventeen files, all rendered on the website. Every chapter has a references section and a `Phi sources` subsection; the close carries only Phi sources, and `book/bibliography.md` consolidates all 166 cited works, each entry byte-identical to the reference line in every chapter that cites it, verified in both directions.