A construct is an invented word, an invented meaning and a compound glyph, standing for what an entire Spell turned out to be about. A Spell is a body of work the machine found by reading twenty years of images at once. The construct is the word it collapses into once it holds.
Every Spell carries two of them. The construct is the formal word, the one the language records: soft, agglutinative, three or four syllables. The spoken name is the short one, the one said out loud and printed on things. They name the same object and they are not interchangeable.
The compound is assembled out of marks the language already has. 5 to 6 atoms drawn from the register of 138, anchored on the Spell's own concept mark where it has one, and closing on ⧗ RESOLVE, which the register defines as converge, close, reframe. The closing mark is the whole point: it records that the body of work is finished, not that it is going well. The genre is older than these thirteen: the language already records KISTMAMATA (THE-ERASED-FACE + RECURSE) and KONITONG (THE-BORROWED-FACE + CONTRAST) as words of the same kind.
Counted when this page was built: 13 constructs, 13 of them closing on RESOLVE, 13 built entirely out of marks the register already holds, and 0 of them written into the dictionary so far. Recording them in canon is a separate step from approving them, and until it happens the dictionary and the translator on this site will not return any of these words.
The 13
Said in the order they formed: Tolla, Afterglo, Noana, Buffa, Facetta, Wolga, Mitta, Blanko, Rerunna, Skema, Majja, Kulku, Kehra.
How a word declares what it knows
A dash suffix on the Latin word says how the word knows itself, and the matching atom is appended to the compound in front of RESOLVE. It is the difference between a thing somebody saw, a thing a system inferred, and a thing that was reported by someone with a reason to lie. The language would rather carry that on the word than leave it to be assumed.
| Suffix | What the word declares | Mark | Atom |
|---|---|---|---|
| -VO | witnessed firsthand | ⦿ | FOCUS |
| -RI | inferred: the data saw it, nobody did | ⧬ | INTERPRET |
| -XA | reported in bad faith | ⨂ | NEGATE-SELF |
| -NU | hypothetical, never checked | ⧐ | HYPOTHETICAL |
| -MA | remembered: true once, ruptured since | ⧊ | RUPTURE |
Three more suffixes place the word in time on the same mechanics:
| Suffix | What the word declares | Mark | Atom |
|---|---|---|---|
| -ENN | before | ⨽ | BEFORE |
| -NYT | during | ⨿ | DURING |
| -JAL | after | ⨾ | AFTER |
Two further classes take no atom. -NULM marks a word issued by the store, and
-913 marks one claimed by the language itself. Suffixes also chain, and a chain that
disagrees with itself is the point rather than a mistake: a word witnessed by a person and
inferred by a payroll system carries both, and reads as contested testimony. A struck suffix
withdraws its own declaration, so that even the remembering is struck.
Testimony forms exist for 13 of the 13 Spells. Some are set out below.
How the words get marked
The words are printed damaged. Struck, voided, stammered. Two rules hold that in place, and both of them are about restraint rather than effect.
The Latin can be struck, voided or redacted. The glyphs are never damaged. English is the language being corrected here, so English is what takes the mark. The compound survives every correction intact, which is the claim the whole series is making.
Damage is earned by the word, never applied as a style. A set where everything is struck is a decorative set. In a printed group the forms are mixed and some words are left clean, because the clean ones are what make the damaged ones read as decisions. That is why 4 forms are shown here and the 13 words above are set plain.
Two production notes, since they are what separates these forms from an approximation of them. The strike is a drawn rule at cap height, never a combining character: combining strikes set unevenly across letterforms and vanish at small sizes. The void is a drawn zero with a ruled slash, because U+2205 is in none of the faces this site sets, and a literal one would arrive in a typeface that appears nowhere else on the page.