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An example name asserted outside the format it exemplifies pins nothing (Nguyen Thi Van is pinned under FAMILY_FIRST) #470
Description
rules.md#P6 pins Nguyen Thi Van under both family-first orders:
"Nguyen Thi Van" family-first-given-last → given="Van"
"Nguyen Thi Van" family-first → middle="Van"
It is an FFGL-format name. Its FF reading is wrong by construction, so the second line asserts an output nobody wants and nothing should depend on — and freezes a value that a future fix would have to be described as "breaking". The same shape, reversed, applies to Beethoven Ludwig van asserted under FFGL.
An example name carries a format. Asserting it outside that format tests the parser against a premise the name never had.
rules.md has nowhere to record this today: an example line carries an input, an optional policy annotation, a field and a value, but nothing that says which format the name is written in — so there is no way to distinguish "this is the answer for this name" from "this is what falls out if you parse it under a format it was never written in".
Why this bites now, measured
rules.md's ambiguous-particle coverage is one word deep. Of the 37 ambiguous particles in the shipped vocabulary, only 4 appear in an example where the particle stands alone: abu, del, do, van — and van is 12 of those 18 occurrences. von, le, la and freiherr appear only inside chains (Freiherr von Berg, de la Vega).
So a rule about a lone ambiguous particle is effectively tested through one word, and that word drags a second particle (van der) behind it. A format label would make it visible that the coverage is one name deep rather than eight.
Questions
- Should an example line be able to declare its format, and should the doc test refuse to run a name outside it?
- Or is the right unit a
Not-an-example-of:note, so the FF line forNguyen Thi Vancan be deleted with a reason rather than silently?
Activity
derek73 commentedon Sep 2, 2026
Closing: no notation is needed. The
Accepted:clause is already theright home for this, and both halves of the issue turn out not to hold.
Measured against master at c1a98a9, 2026-09-02.
The example is stale in both halves. #467 deleted the FAMILY_FIRST
line from P6 and left an
Accepted:clause saying why. And the outputthis issue quoted is no longer what the parser produces:
So the FF reading is not
middle="Van"— it is P6's own particleattachment firing, folding
Vaninto the family. That is the behaviorP6's earlier
Accepted:clause already documents, in as many words: theASCII spelling collides with the tussenvoegsel reading and the name
loses its given name. The out-of-format reading is a consequence of a
documented rule, not an unrecorded premise, and
"Nguyen, Thi Van" → family="Van Nguyen"is already asserted three clauses above.No live instance, and no recurrence. Across all 240 example inputs
in rules.md, six are asserted under more than one order —
Jong Anke de,Juan de la Vega,Ménil Christophe de,Sheik abdul salam,de Mesnil Jean,de la Cruz Juan Carlos. Every one is deliberate: eachasserts a different field or a different value, showing how the reading
changes with the order. None is the shape this issue describes. A
format:declaration would need explicit opt-ins on all six to catchnothing, and
not-an-example-of:would enforce a convention that hasbeen violated once and was fixed. mechanisms.md#MAKE-WRONG-STATES-UNREPRESENTABLE
is for a convention that keeps being violated however clearly it is
written down; this is not that.
The coverage half is already answered, and declined. The numbers
have moved and the shape holds: of the 37 ambiguous particles in the
shipped vocabulary, 4 stand alone in an example (
van26,abu3,do3,
del1 — 33 occurrences, sovanis 26 of 33, not the 12 of 18filed here),
von/le/la/freiherrappear only inside chains, and29 of the 37 appear in no example at all. But that is per-entry
coverage, which rules.md's Not-in-scope already declines: "what the
tests owe is one exercise per behavioral fork rather than one per entry"
(mechanisms.md#VOCABULARY-EXERCISES-FORKS). The lone-ambiguous-particle
fork has 33 exercises. They are a
vanmonoculture — a real fragility,since a change to that word's membership moves 26 examples at once — but
the fork is exercised, and a row pins a fork, not a wordlist entry.
Recompute: parse
Nguyen Thi Vanunder both orders throughParser(policy=...)with the policies intests/v2/rules_doc.py; forthe other two, walk
parse_rules_doc(RULES_DOC.read_text())and groupexample inputs by order-bearing annotation, and intersect the example
words against
Lexicon.default().particles_ambiguous.P6's
Accepted:clause keeps its(#470)citation — it points at wherethe question was raised, and this comment is the answer.
review round: PR #517 findings
fix(post_rules): the trailing particle is decided by its slot, not it…