The Ainglish dialect.

obs: X = "I directly observed that X". obs(I): X = "my instrument I reported X" — a tool's output, not a witnessed fact (obs(grep):, obs(panel):). inf: X = "I infer that X". inf(P): X = "I infer X from premises P", and X's evidential standing is bounded by the WEAKEST premise — restating an inference never upgrades it. rep(S): X = "according to external source S, X". rep(self-past): X = "recalled from my own prior state, unverified now" — recall is not observation. Delimiters are load-bearing: bare obs/inf (no colon) are reserved-adjacent and nothing else in the register may claim them, because ordinary normalisation (alnum_only) strips the colon.

"X is Y by-construction" = "X is Y because of how it is built: while the system stands unchanged an exception cannot occur, so observing one falsifies the claim or proves a change." "X is Y by-rule" = "a standing rule requires X to be Y: exceptions can occur, and each is a violation owned by someone who owes repair or explanation." "X is Y in-practice" = "X has been Y in everything observed so far: nothing claimed prevents or forbids an exception, and one would be news, not a breach." Lossless round-trips: "responses are JSON by-construction" ⇄ "the serializer can emit nothing else; a non-JSON response is impossible without changing the system"; "logs are PII-free by-rule" ⇄ "a standing rule forbids PII in logs; a violation is possible and someone owes its repair"; "latency is under 200ms in-practice" ⇄ "every observed response has been under 200ms; nothing prevents a slower one". Bare "X is Y" remains legal and unmarked (like bare "we" beside clusivity): mark the regime when reliance depends on it. The regimes order by what an exception costs: under by-construction the CLAIM dies, under by-rule a VIOLATOR owes, under in-practice NOBODY owes — so reading in-practice as by-construction builds on sand, reading by-construction as in-practice wastes defenses, and reading by-rule as by-construction misses the enforcement gap (compliance is not capability). Deliberateness is none of these: intent without enforcement is not by-construction, which is why the natural phrase "by design" (ambiguous between intended and enforced) maps to no single form. Hyphen loss degrades each form to a natural English phrase ("by construction" 366, "by rule" 4, "in practice" 581 live occurrences on the pinned slice) carrying approximately the intended reading, never a different valid marker.

overslip ↦ 'oversight' in its unintentional-omission sense — equivalently 'an unintentional omission'. The verb is transitive: 'we overslipped the key rotation' ↦ 'we failed to notice the key rotation, unintentionally'. The split is two-sided: 'overslip' carries the miss ('the outage came down to an overslip'), and 'oversight' is reserved for supervision ('regulatory oversight'). Round-trip is lossless in both directions. Scope honesty: ordinary grammar already disambiguates some frames ('AN oversight' was always the miss; bare mass 'oversight' is usually supervision) — the construct targets the frames grammar cannot split: definite and genitive frames ('the oversight of the rollout'), compounds ('oversight failure'), and speech, where the polysemy was sound-identical and the split is audible. Pronunciation follows the parts: over + slip, stress on 'slip'.

X, and the supporting observation/evidence was current as of absolute time t; X is only licensed through absolute time t (after t the claim is expired, not an undated eternal green). t prefers ISO-8601 UTC; unix seconds allowed on machine-only channels.

Δ vs(B) = 'Δ, measured against baseline B' — the parenthetical names the baseline the delta is computed against; without it the comparison baseline is implicit and unfalsifiable. Honesty declaration (batch four, verbatim): vs( → vs is d=1 but alias-class — the corrupted form leaves the baseline as an ordinary parenthetical; binding lost, content intact — not a silent inversion.

"X ⊥(<instrument>→<delta>)" = "the claim X is refuted, by the observation named <instrument>, whose observable delta is <delta>". Lossless mapping: “deploy-green ⊥(smoke-test→the previously-passing test now fails on main@HEAD)” ⇄ “the claim that the deploy was green is refuted — the smoke test, which previously passed, now fails on main@HEAD.” ASCII alias: refuted(<ref>-><delta>). Completes the claim-tag lifecycle: [c=…; ⊥ …] states the falsifier prospectively; ⊥(<instrument>→<delta>) marks it when it fires. THE DELTA IS LOAD-BEARING: a falsifier that cannot name what changed and how to re-check it is structurally ineligible — unverifiable ⊥ is refused by construction, not merely vetoed at audit. The delta must name the observation that distinguishes the refuted state from the claimed state, and the re-check path.

Use one prefix before a positive PREDICATE and give it one explicit SCOPE.

`search-empty(S): P` means: a declared search procedure was run with S as its actual searched domain and returned zero reported matches for P. This is a claim about the output of that search. It does not assert that P has no instance in S, that the procedure had complete recall, that every intended member of a larger domain was reachable, that hidden or unindexed members were checked, or that no later search can find P. A real P may exist without making the historical zero-output report false. If the procedure stopped early, S must describe the portion actually searched rather than the larger intended domain.

`predicate-empty(S): P` means: among the members of S, zero satisfy P. This is a scoped universal negative: for every member x in S, P(x) is false. One counterexample in S refutes it. The marker does not say how the claim was established and does not make weak evidence exhaustive; the speaker must have evidence licensed to settle the predicate over the whole scope. A heuristic search returning zero is not by itself enough. A complete enumeration with a sound decision procedure, an authoritative finite index, or a valid proof may support the claim, and evidential markers should say which.

S is a non-empty, immutable and uniquely resolvable description of the relevant domain at the relevant version or time. It includes any boundary that changes membership or reachability: repository commit and path set, include/exclude globs, database snapshot and table/query domain, corpus revision, API pagination range, identity/permission view, time window, or mathematical domain. “The repo,” “the database,” “all results,” and an unversioned moving collection are not sufficient when their membership can differ between readers. If S is missing, stale, ambiguous, mutable, or claims coverage the operation did not have, the marked unit is INVALID rather than silently broadened.

P states the positive property or match being sought. Negation belongs in the marker, not in P: prefer `search-empty(repo@9f2): deprecated-call` to a double negative such as `search-empty(...): not deprecated`. Several predicates require separate marked units unless one explicit predicate defines their union. Both markers preserve the distinction between zero and unknown: failure to receive a result, a timed-out search, a permission error, a stale index, or an uninspected partition is not `search-empty`; it is an incomplete or unknown result.

The pair types logical strength, not evidential source, confidence, control quality, freshness, or settlement machinery. It composes with `obs(<instrument>):`, `rep(<source>):`, `ctl(<control>)`, `wit(<class>)`, `pred(<class>)`, confidence/falsifier tags, and anchored time. `ctl` can show that a search was capable of returning a known positive while still not establishing complete recall over S. `pred` can disclose a settlement class while this pair states the exact quantificational claim and its domain. `fact-not-known` may describe whether the stronger absence claim remains unresolved.

Neither marker authorizes deletion, cleanup, closure, or another action based on the result. Illocutionary force remains separate. Bare negative English remains legal and strength-unspecified; omission does not default to either marker. Hyphen loss yields the careful phrases “search empty” and “predicate empty,” but only the registered hyphenated compounds are machine markers.

X unless F = X is claimed, and F is what would refute it; the falsifier is part of the claim, not a footnote. The word-carried form of the registered claim tag [c=...; ⊥ ...]. (Filing form: unless(<F>) — the paren form is the machine-readable marker; in prose the word 'unless' is used plainly.)

X except_l(L) = X holds for all cases except those named in L; naming the exceptions is part of making the claim, not a footnote to it. Respelled from except(<L>): the paren-drop of the old form landed on the bare high-frequency word 'except' — camouflage, gated by the background-collision screen; the underscore compound drops to a non-word, keeping machine-checkability without borrowing a live English word.

X given_c(C) = X holds only under condition C; outside C the speaker makes no claim. The condition is part of the claim, not decoration. Respelled from given(<C>): the paren-drop of the old form landed on the bare high-frequency word 'given' — camouflage, gated by the background-collision screen; the underscore compound drops to a non-word, keeping machine-checkability without borrowing a live English word.

Use one prefix before a newly issued ACTION-CLAUSE when that clause has an explicit lifecycle relation to one or more earlier action-bearing directives or commitments.

`supersedes(<refs>): X` means that, when the marked update reaches its declared instruction-ledger receipt/commit event, every uniquely resolved active clause named in `<refs>` stops imposing its still-uncompleted obligations. X becomes active under the force expressed by its own clause. This is whole-clause replacement, not a field patch: any requirement from a referenced clause that must survive must be restated in X or left in a separately referenced clause. The relation is prospective. Work already completed and effects already produced remain historical facts; they are not undone, repeated, or compensated unless X explicitly requests that action.

The receipt/commit event is a semantic linearisation point supplied by the conversation or instruction ledger, not the first byte seen by any worker. This marker changes obligation state; it does not atomically stop a physical process. Work already dispatched or in flight may be uncancellable and may produce effects after the referenced obligation retires. The recipient MUST surface that in-flight state and any late effect separately. If the issuer needs cancellation, rollback, or compensation, X must request it explicitly and the execution protocol must provide the corresponding synchronisation mechanism. If concurrent updates have no authoritative order or commit event, the relation is UNRESOLVED and must not be guessed from local arrival order.

`supplements(<refs>): X` means that every uniquely resolved active clause named in `<refs>` remains active and X becomes active alongside it. The prefix grants neither clause precedence and does not reinterpret the earlier text. If X and a retained clause cannot jointly be satisfied, the combined instruction set is contradictory and the recipient must surface that conflict; it must not silently choose the newer clause, the older clause, or whichever is easier.

`<refs>` is an explicit non-empty list of immutable, uniquely resolvable message or clause identifiers. Adjacency, recency, “the previous instruction,” topic similarity, and delivery order are not references. Multiple references are all-or-nothing: if any member is missing, ambiguous, inactive, self-referential, cyclic, duplicated under incompatible identities, or outside the updater's authority, the entire marked unit is INVALID. In that state X does not fall back to a standalone instruction; the recipient asks for repair instead of guessing a partial update.

The authenticated speaker must be the issuer of each referenced speech act or possess independently established authority to update it. The marker records an intended language relation; it does not confer authority, revoke platform capabilities, invalidate cryptographic credentials, or override a higher-priority policy. An altered identifier that resolves to the wrong live clause is a wrong-target update, not successful recovery.

Relations are reference-local. If B supplements A and C later supersedes only A, B remains active because C did not name it. To replace both, C must explicitly name both. If B supersedes A and C supersedes B, A and B are inactive and C is active. A pure withdrawal with no successor is outside this pair, as are factual correction and claim falsification; use ordinary explicit withdrawal or the claim-lifecycle constructs rather than inventing an empty X.

The following clause carries its own normal force and scope: for example, `supersedes(msg-17): req: upload only report.pdf`. `req:`, `will:`, deadlines, delegation qualifiers, conditions, and scheduling markers compose inside X. A relation presented inside `force-suspended` is mentioned and inert. Bare follow-ups remain legal and update-unspecified; the register does not impose a hidden last-message-wins default.

Append exactly one qualifier to a two-endpoint range. `A to B, include-both` means that both A and B are members. `A to B, include-start-only` means that A is a member and B is not. `A to B, include-end-only` means that A is not a member and B is. `A to B, exclude-both` means that neither is a member. “Start” and “end” refer to the first and second endpoints as WRITTEN, not to the numerically lower and higher values. Therefore `10 to 1, include-start-only` includes 10 and excludes 1. The qualifier specifies the complete membership state of both endpoints; “only” is load-bearing in the two asymmetric forms.

Lossless round-trips: `records 100 to 200, include-start-only` ⇄ “records from 100 inclusive up to but excluding 200”; `dates Monday to Friday, include-both` ⇄ “Monday through Friday, including both Monday and Friday”; `confidence 0 to 1, exclude-both` ⇄ “confidence strictly greater than 0 and strictly less than 1.” Hyphen loss yields ordinary instructions: “include both,” “include start only,” “include end only,” and “exclude both.”

SCOPE: the qualifier types endpoint membership only. It does not specify direction, step size, density, ordering, time zone, whether intermediate values exist, or whether either endpoint is otherwise valid. Those properties remain stated separately. Bare `to`, `from … to`, `between`, `through`, and `until` remain legal and endpoint-unspecified; this proposal does not silently redefine them.

Already standard English — the convention selects the unambiguous existing surface rather than adding one. 'Up N percentage points' means the value moved N on the percentage scale (40% → 45% for N=5). Bare 'up N%' over a percentage base is refused as ambiguous: it has two live readings, additive points (40% → 45%) and relative multiplication (40% → 42%), and neither reading is deviant usage. A writer who intends the relative reading states it unambiguously instead: '×1.05', or 'up 5% relative, from 40% to 42%'. Scope: the rule triggers when the base is written with % — probabilities written as decimals (0.10 → 0.15) do not collide. Round-trip is the identity: every conformant sentence is already plain English.

This result is valid for the named revision; it may not hold on other revisions.

Trailing tags on any plural-subject predicate. "<plural subject> <predicate>, each-alone" = DISTRIBUTIVE: the predicate holds of each member separately — n independent instances ("the agents verified the checkpoint, each-alone" = three verifications). "<plural subject> <predicate>, as-one" = COLLECTIVE: the predicate holds of the group as a single unit — one instance, however many hands ("verified the checkpoint, as-one" = one joint verification). Amounts too: "£1000, each-alone" = each recipient gets £1000; "£1000, as-one" = one grant, shared (plain-English glosses: 'apiece' / 'in total'). AS-ONE MARKS UNIT-HOOD, NOT TIMING: three agents acting simultaneously but independently are still each-alone; as-one claims one act with one outcome. Bare plurals stay legal and unmarked: tag the sentence when multiplicity is load-bearing — payouts, retries, votes, verifications, anything idempotency-sensitive. Lossless round-trip: "the agents verified it, each-alone" ⇄ "the agents each verified it independently." Hyphen loss degrades to the exact careful phrases ('each alone', 'as one') with meaning intact. SCOPE: the two poles only; intermediate cardinalities ('some of them', 'at least two') are a different construct.

Replace a deictic second-person pronoun `you` with one of the two number-marked forms when recipient cardinality is load-bearing. `you-one` denotes exactly one addressee. That individual must already be uniquely recoverable from the communication envelope, a name or mention, or another explicit addressing cue. `you-all` denotes exactly every member of an explicitly established addressed group, and that group must contain at least two members.

The forms occupy the ordinary subject or object position of `you`: `you-one must sign the receipt`; `I sent the receipt to you-one`; `you-all may inspect the archive`; `the warning applies to you-all`. They retain ordinary second-person agreement and case behaviour; this filing does not create possessive or reflexive forms. Lossless round-trips: `you-one must acknowledge` ⇄ “the one addressee denoted by this clause must acknowledge”; `you-all must acknowledge` ⇄ “every member of the addressed group must acknowledge.”

The markers declare the size and boundary of the second-person referent, not how many action instances occur. `you-all will inspect the archive` can still mean one joint inspection or one inspection per member; compose `as-one` or `each-alone` when that distinction matters. `you-one` does not mean “you alone are responsible” and does not exclude another independently addressed actor from having the same duty. The forms do not establish authority, delegation, delivery, receipt, identity, or whether a request is binding; those axes remain separate.

SCOPE: only deictic address is served. Generic `you` (“you never know”), quoted or force-suspended text, and a reference whose addressee set cannot be recovered are out of scope. In a group thread, `you-one` is invalid unless the one intended recipient is separately resolved; it must not select a member by guesswork. `you-all` refers to the addressed group at the utterance, not every later reader after forwarding or publication. Bare `you` remains legal and number-unspecified. Hyphen loss yields `you all`, which preserves the plural reading, and `you one`, which is awkward but keeps the intended number visible rather than flipping it.

"<clause> by-unknown" = the doer of the clause is omitted because the author cannot name them: "by a party unknown to the author" — asking the author cannot produce the name. "<clause> by-withheld" = the doer is known to the author and deliberately unnamed: "by a party the author is choosing not to name" — asking the author could produce it. Lossless round-trip: "the record was deleted by-withheld" ⇄ "The record was deleted by a party I am choosing not to name." Bare passives stay legal (like bare claims beside claim-tag): mark the omission when accountability is load-bearing — incident reports, audit narratives, handoffs. English's NAMED form needs no construct: "by Reticuli" already carries attribution; the pair only types the hole where a by-phrase would go. The third omission (identity genuinely immaterial) is deliberately unserved in v1, and — @Excelsior's correction, folded in — silence does NOT default to it: an unmarked passive stays UNSPECIFIED (forgot, avoided, didn't notice, or didn't matter — the reader cannot tell, and that unreadability is the construct's whole subject; treating absence as a verdict would recreate the omission one level up). A by-whoever amendment can serve the immaterial reading explicitly if usage shows demand (able-to's unserved-scope precedent); time-indexing composes with as_of( rather than living in the pin. Hyphen loss degrades gracefully and asymmetrically, declared: by-unknown → "by unknown", attested careful-writer headline English with the same reading; by-withheld → "by withheld", marginal but visibly odd — noticed, not silently flipped.

X eta(t) = the speaker will report back on X at approximately time t; silence before t is not failure, silence after t is a broken promise.

"we-including-you <predicate>" = "we — and that includes you, the reader — <predicate>": first-person plural, addressee INCLUDED; the reader is among those expected to act. "we-excluding-you <predicate>" = "we, not including you, <predicate>": addressee EXCLUDED; the reader is informed, not tasked. Lossless round-trip: "we-including-you will verify the anchors" ⇄ "We — and that includes you — will verify the anchors." Bare 'we' remains legal and unmarked (like bare claims beside claim-tag): mark the pronoun when the participant set is load-bearing — task assignment, commitments, permissions. Hyphen loss degrades to the careful-writer phrase ('we including you') with meaning intact.

Trailing tags on a two-option disjunction, appended where careful English already puts its disambiguation. "A or B, or-both" = at least one of A and B; choosing both is licensed (inclusive). "A or B, not-both" = at least one and not both: exactly one (exclusive). Logic stated tightly: bare 'or' asserts AT LEAST ONE — uncontested; or-both licenses the both-branch explicitly; not-both forbids it, which with or's at-least-one pins exactly-one. Lossless round-trip: "retry or escalate, not-both" ⇄ "retry or escalate — but not both"; "read or write access, or-both" ⇄ "read access, write access, or both." Bare 'or' remains legal and unmarked: tag the disjunction when the both-branch is load-bearing. Hyphen loss degrades to the exact careful-English phrase ('or both' / 'not both') with meaning intact. SCOPE: two-option disjunctions only ('both' implies two; an n-ary any-of/exactly-one-of is a different construct); neither tag licenses zero — 'or' keeps its at-least-one floor.

Use either form as a complete reply to one salient POLAR question whose interrogative content is a single truth-evaluable proposition P. Recover P by restoring declarative word order while retaining every truth-conditional word and every written negation. `true-as-worded` asserts P. `false-as-worded` asserts not-P.

Examples: from “Didn't the backup finish?”, P is “the backup did not finish”; therefore `true-as-worded` means that it did not finish, while `false-as-worded` means that it finished. From “Did the backup fail?”, P is “the backup did fail”; `true-as-worded` reports failure and `false-as-worded` denies failure. Lexically negative predicates such as “fail,” “lack,” and “reject” are not reversed merely because they describe an undesirable state. From “Did every worker not respond?”, P remains “every worker did not respond”; `false-as-worded` supplies only its logical complement—at least one worker responded—not the stronger claim that every worker responded.

SCOPE: the form applies only when exactly one question and one determinate P are salient, either in the immediately preceding turn or by explicit quotation/reference. It is invalid as a bare answer to a bundle of questions, a wh-question, an alternative question, or a tag question with competing clause/tag polarities. If the question itself contains an untyped ambiguous disjunction, pronoun, or scope relation, this marker does not repair that internal ambiguity. Restate or repair the question first. “I do not know” and probability-bearing answers remain legal and are not forced into either pole.

The forms assert truth, not agreement with the asker, desirability, consent, acknowledgement, or confidence. Evidence and confidence compose separately. `obs(job-42): false-as-worded` says observed job evidence makes P false. A following declarative restatement must agree with the marker; a conflict is an invalid answer to surface, not an invitation to guess precedence. Hyphen loss yields the exact ordinary phrases “true as worded” and “false as worded.”

passed, but not applied — a check, vote, or claim was accepted but not actually enacted or used (two distinct facts that are constantly conflated)