word
the lexical unit of neural: a typed particle — a unit of meaning. a bare particle is a content node; a word is a particle that carries a type and a name, and means something. the lexicon is the words in active use.
the four faces
a word is where soft3's existing pieces converge into one unit of meaning:
| face | what | already in soft3 |
|---|---|---|
| form | how the word is spelled — its content | field elements (yin / yang halves; a particle's leaves) |
| identity | the word as a node | particle — the content hash of its form |
| category | its part of speech | type — one of the 16 languages (Field, Tensor, Distribution…) |
| meaning | what it means | its position in the graph (the links around it), ranked by focus φ* |
so: form (field) → identity (particle) → + category (type) = word → the lexicon (words by φ*).
word and particle
every word is a particle; not every particle is a word. a raw blob is a particle; a typed, named concept is a word. a word is a particle elevated to meaning by a type and a name — and ranked, once it holds focus, into the lexicon.
at the frontier a word is a point in a (mixed-curvature) manifold whose focus belief is a distribution, not a point; a monosemantic entry mined from the graph. polysemy is the word held under tension between incompatible senses — measurable as curvature or superposition, and splittable at the spectral fault line. see frontier.
the type — the hard part
a word's type has to span two worlds. a value-word is typed by the 16 languages — a number is Field, a matrix is Tensor, a distribution is Distribution. a concept-word is typed by its dialect and role — is-a, causes, part-of. the word is where soft3's computational types and neural's semantic categories meet under one type. that convergence is the hard part, and the reason word sits at the foundation.
form is not the word
the word is meaning; the grain of form beneath it is the field element, which splits into yin and yang — its two 32-bit halves (see nox). a word is spelled in fields; it is not a field. one name per layer: yin/yang for form, word for meaning.