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 — two halves, one declared
a word's type spans two worlds, and the resolution is to not store both. one half is declared, the other emerges:
- computational type (
ctype) — declared, stored. a value-word is typed by the 16 languages — a number is Field, a matrix is Tensor, a distribution is Distribution. this is fixed by nox at the form; a word carries it. - semantic role — emergent, derived. is-a, causes, part-of are not a stored field. a word's role is its position — which relation-words it links through, ranked by focus. neural's types are not declared; they emerge (see the explanation). so the role is read from the graph, never written on the word.
so the stored word is { particle, ctype, name }; the semantic type is a reading of the neighbourhood, not a column. that split is what makes word buildable — the "convergence" was only hard while we tried to store the half that emerges.
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.