Petal learns French, and the pack that shipped was misspelling itself

Phase 24, the fr half: langpack, Hunspell dictionary, Piper voice, and the
lexicon coverage that turned out to have been measured already (63.1%, better
than pt-PT's 62.1%). No migration; not deployed.

The plan recorded that build_ptpt_dictionary.py "generalizes" to French. It
did not. It handled single-character flags and plain PFX/SFX and stopped on
everything else, and fr.aff uses four of the things it stopped on. FLAG long
is the dangerous one: French flags are two characters, so the old reader's
set(flagstr) yields a bag of unrelated letters and expands every entry through
the wrong paradigm without ever erroring. Plus continuation flags (French
really does affix an affixed form), NEEDAFFIX on 68,075 of 84,140 stems, and
FULLSTRIP. Renamed build_hunspell_dictionary.py with a per-language profile,
asserting that CIRCUMFIX and FORBIDDENWORD are still unused rather than
assuming it — and it rebuilds pt-PT byte-identical to the shipped asset, which
is the only thing that makes "generalized" a claim rather than a hope.

Elision was decided by building both halves and measuring. Keeping l'arbre and
its thirty-three siblings: 3,159,832 forms, 8.25 MB gzipped. Dropping them:
473,326 and 1.19 MB. They are not new words, but the tokenizer keeps internal
apostrophes, so they genuinely would have been underlined — so they moved out
of the dictionary into withElision, which splits at a known clitic and still
requires the remainder to be a word (l'zzzz stays flagged). Real nspell: 369 ms
and 74 MB, against pt-PT's 842 ms and 139 MB, on the larger language.

Where the regional trap lives is the mirror image of Portuguese's: every fr_*
Piper voice is fr_FR and Debian's fr_FR/fr_CA/fr_BE dictionaries are one shared
word list, so nothing can be quietly wrong about the country and the whole
decision sits in the copy. What French has instead is the 1990 reform, packaged
three ways; comprehensive ships, because Petal never corrects her French and
coût and cout are both correct.

Then the interim review pass, at the user's suggestion and explicitly "for
now": four models read each Latin pack independently, and only findings at
least two of them reached on their own were applied — five per pack. It earned
its keep on the pack that was already live. pt-PT was carrying pre-Acordo
spellings (adjectivos, actualmente) in a file whose own header commits to
post-Acordo, plus Brazilian decepção, because the Phase 21 greps checked for
Brazilian vocabulary and never checked the pack against its own spelling
policy. That grep now exists and was confirmed to fail on the old text before
being kept. Where reviewers agreed a line was wrong but split on the fix, the
wording is mine and the reasoning is in BUILD_PLAN rather than averaged away.

Still owed, and both packs now say so precisely: a quorum of models agreeing is
agreement, not authority. No native speaker has read either pack, and none of
this has been seen in a browser.

go build/vet/test clean, tsc, vite build, vitest 190/190.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016y6gyuHkQXPiEuW8RGQyua

BUILD_PLAN.md

@@ -309,18 +309,33 @@ Raised by the user, not by the plan: *"I see no way to change my language in the
 **Deployed 2026-07-27** (`1f4ca47`), and it carried Phase 22 with it — the two could not be separated in the tree, so the user chose to ship both. Pre-deploy snapshot `data/backups/petal-pre-phase22-20260727T220410Z.db` (VACUUM INTO against the live app). On the box: migrations 0012 and 0013 applied, `source` backfilled **llm=100 / local=3** — the three are her pre-existing `mechanics` rows, claimed by type exactly as the migration intended. Her writing came through untouched: 9 documents, 33 versions, 103 suggestions, `integrity_check` ok. All four containers healthy, read-aloud still resolving `en/pt/zh`, dictionary still open on all five languages. `PATCH /api/me` answers **401 without a session** rather than 405, which is the only half of it a signed-out probe can prove — the route is mounted and behind auth.
 - **All three accounts are still on `zh`, deliberately.** Flipping her pair is hers to do now that the button exists, and doing it for her from a shell is precisely the change this phase was built to stop needing.
 
-### Phase 24 (planned) — the fr and es pairs
-Scope agreed with the user 2026-07-27: *"switcher for Chinese and Portuguese now, plan support for others in a later session or two."* Phase 21 is the groove; the work per language is the same five items, and the order below is the order in which each one stops being a blocker for the next.
-1. **The langpack** (~450 lines, `web/src/i18n/packs/{fr,es}.ts`). TypeScript names every string a new pack still owes, so this is mechanical to *start* and slow to *finish* — the companion lines, the bedtime proverbs and the false-friend list are written for the pair, not translated from zh. es and fr both have real en-collisions to exploit (*actuellement*/*actually*, *librería*/*library*), so both want the `alsoIn` and false-friend blocks pt-PT proved. Add the code to `auth.shippedPairs` **in the same commit** — the picker and the server's allowlist are two halves of one fact.
-2. **A native-speaker review.** Standing at ⚠️ for pt-PT since Phase 21 and inherited here; expect a speaker to change the register before the vocabulary.
-3. **Hunspell dictionaries.** `scripts/build_ptpt_dictionary.py` generalizes — the eager-affix-expansion problem is French's and Spanish's too, and both are Latin-script so `extendedAlphabet` already covers them. Watch the same trap that caught pt: check what the *source* actually is before vendoring it (fr has `hunspell-fr-classique` vs `-moderne` vs `-toutesvariantes`; es is packaged per country).
-4. **Piper voices.** Phase 21 made this configuration rather than code: a compose service and two `.env` lines per language (`TTS_ENDPOINT_FR`/`TTS_VOICE_FR`). fr and es both have several European voices in Piper's catalogue, and unlike pt-PT the download path is plain ASCII — so this is the cheapest item on the list.
-5. **Lexicon coverage.** `dict.db` has held all five languages since Phase 20, so both directions should already answer; measure gloss coverage the way pt-PT's 62% was measured before assuming it.
-Not blockers, and cheap because Phase 19 did them: `internal/llm/lang.go` already carries fr and es, and `grammarLite`'s L1 rules already gate *ter 30 anos* / "I am agree" / "since three years" to pt+fr+es.
+### Phase 24 — the fr pair ✅ (2026-07-27, code half) — and what the plan got wrong about it
+Scope agreed with the user 2026-07-27: *"switcher for Chinese and Portuguese now, plan support for others in a later session or two."* Then, this session: **French end to end, code only, deploy its own step** — es follows as a repeat of a proven groove rather than two half-finished pairs. Phase 21 was supposed to be the groove and mostly was; the exception is item 3, which the plan had recorded as solved and was not.
+1. [x] **The langpack** (`web/src/i18n/packs/fr.ts`, 470 lines). Metropolitan French, tutoiement, *se connecter* rather than *login* — and the regional decision lives **entirely here**, unlike pt: Debian's `fr_FR`, `fr_CA`, `fr_BE`, `fr_CH`, `fr_LU` and `fr_MC` are all symlinks to one word list, so there is no dictionary to get wrong and nothing but the copy to get right. A vitest greps the built pack for *courriel*, *clavarder*, *magasiner* and *fin de semaine*, exactly as the pt-PT one greps for Brazilian forms — the error nobody reviewing the diff can see. The pack punctuates the way French does (« guillemets », a space before  ! ? : ;), which is *also* the habit `prose.spaceBeforePunct` warns her about in her English: the copy demonstrates the rule its own prose note tells her not to carry across. An ordinary space, not U+202F — a narrow no-break space is invisible in a diff and the next pack author would strip it by accident.
+2. [~] **Reviewed by a quorum of models, not by a native speaker** (2026-07-27, user: "perhaps for now, we could leverage multiple LLMs to act as reviewers… accept the responses that have the most alignment amongst them" — explicitly an interim measure). Four models read each pack independently as native speakers, blind to one another, returning verbatim substrings so agreement could be counted mechanically rather than judged. **Threshold: a finding is applied only if ≥2 of 4 reached it on their own.** Eight reviews, 32 findings, 12 above threshold, 10 applied.
+   - **fr, applied**: `Fatiguée, on écrit mal` (**4/4**), `Clique droit sur un mot anglais` → *Fais un clic droit* (3/4), `je me suis emmêlée` (3/4), `touche pour changer` → *appuie* (2/4), `laisse une espace` → *un espace* (2/4).
+   - **pt-PT, applied**: `adjectivos` → *adjetivos* (3/4), `actualmente` → *atualmente* (3/4), `decepção` → *deceção* (2/4), `Cão abanão` → *Cão abana-rabo* (2/4), `Ouves? Pois não…` → *Pois não ouves…* (2/4).
+   - **Where the reviewers agreed a line was wrong but not on the fix**, the wording is mine and the reasoning is written down rather than averaged: `Fatiguée, on écrit mal` split 2–2 between keeping *on* and switching to *tu*, and *both* camps' stated objection (feminine agreement with impersonal *on*) survives the *on* wording — so **Quand tu es fatiguée, tu écris mal** is the only candidate that answers every reviewer, and it matches the pack's own tutoiement. `je me suis emmêlée` drew three different fixes; *emmêlé les pinceaux* is the actual idiom and makes the participle invariable, which also settles the fourth reviewer's point that the companion is a *chat* and therefore masculine.
+   - **The finding that justifies the exercise**: pt-PT was carrying **pre-Acordo spellings** — *adjectivos*, *actualmente* — in direct contradiction of its own header, plus Brazilian *decepção*. Phase 21's vitest greps the pack for Brazilian *vocabulary* and never checked the pack against its own stated *spelling policy*, so this had been shipped and reviewed and was still invisible. The grep now covers nine pre-Acordo forms, and was confirmed to fail on the old text before being kept.
+   - **Below threshold, deliberately not applied** (1/4 each): *very* also modifies adverbs, so `veryBeforeVerb` is incomplete rather than false — and the rule that renders it only runs for the zh pair anyway; `aide à lire`; `et toi aussi tu devrais`; `Cansada não se escreve bem`; `Já vais em`; `está toda a gente a dormir`; the `longSentence` infinitive; `breaks[1]`.
+   - ⚠️ **Still not a native speaker.** A quorum of models agreeing is agreement, not authority: it caught a *clique droit* that is not French and an adjective disagreeing with *on*; it cannot catch a line that is correct and lifeless. The ⚠️ at the top of both packs now says which review happened rather than none.
+3. [x] **Hunspell dictionary — and "the pt-PT script generalizes" was wrong.** It handled single-character flags and plain PFX/SFX and *stopped* on anything else, which was the right call and not a generalization: `fr.aff` uses four of the things it stopped on, and every one changes which words are accepted. **`FLAG long`** — French flags are two characters (`S.`, `L'`, `Um`), so `set(flagstr)` yields a bag of unrelated letters and expands every entry through the wrong paradigm; this is the one that fails silently. **Continuation flags** — French really does affix an affixed form (`PFX Um 0 0/S.`), which pt-PT dropped after asserting it was safe to. **`NEEDAFFIX`** on 68,075 of 84,140 stems, the bare form arriving through a zero-append rule. **`FULLSTRIP`**. `CIRCUMFIX` and `FORBIDDENWORD` are declared-but-unused and the script now *asserts* that rather than assuming it. Renamed `scripts/build_hunspell_dictionary.py` with a per-language profile; **the pt-PT rebuild is byte-identical to the shipped asset**, which is what says the generalization did not change the pair that already worked.
+   - **Which of three, not which of six.** fr is packaged by how it treats the 1990 reform: `-classical`, `-revised`, `-comprehensive`. Petal ships **comprehensive**, because Petal never corrects her French — the only thing this dictionary can do is underline something, and *coût* and *cout* are both correct French taught in different decades. The MUST_ACCEPT list *proves* which package was used: classical rejects `cout`, revised rejects `coût`, only comprehensive accepts both.
+   - **Elision is the size decision, and it moved out of the dictionary.** Both halves were built and measured: keeping the elided forms is **3,159,832 forms / 8.25 MB gzipped**; dropping them is **473,326 / 1.19 MB**. They are not new words — thirteen clitics glued to words already in the list — but the tokenizer keeps internal apostrophes, so `l'arbre` really does arrive whole and really would have been underlined. `withElision` splits at a *known* clitic and checks the remainder: `l'arbre` costs one extra hash probe instead of seven megabytes, `zzz'arbre` is still flagged because zzz is not a word French elides, and `l'zzzz` is still flagged because the remainder must itself be a word. Stems carrying their own apostrophe (`aujourd'hui`, `quelqu'un`, `presqu'île`) are kept verbatim and match directly; `entr'aide` is absent for the same reason Dicollecte omits it.
+   - Loaded in a real nspell: **369 ms, 74 MB** for 473,326 forms — cheaper than pt-PT's 842 ms / 139 MB, on a bigger language. Suggestions do the thing an ESL writer needs most: `ecrire` → *écrire*, `francais` → *français*.
+4. [x] **Piper voice** — `piper-fr`, a fourth sidecar off the same image, plus `TTS_ENDPOINT_FR` and `TTS_VOICE_FR`. No Go at all, which is Phase 21's discovery holding: a language is configuration now. The exact opposite of pt's trap — every `fr_*` voice in the catalogue is `fr_FR`, so there is no wrong country to default to, and `fr_FR-siwis-medium` is chosen to match the register of the other three rather than to avoid anything. ASCII, so the percent-encoded download fallback `tugão` needed never fires.
+5. [x] **Lexicon coverage** — already measured, and better than the pair that shipped: the Phase 20 rebuild put fr at **63.1%** of the 2,000 commonest English words against pt-PT's 62.1%. Both directions answer with no code change; `lexicon.Set.For` routes every non-Chinese pair to DreamDict already.
+- Free, because Phase 19 and 22 did them: `internal/llm/lang.go` already carries fr, `grammarLite`'s L1 rules already gate *ter 30 anos* / "I am agree" / "since three years" to pt+fr+es, and the sidebar picker derives itself from the shipped packs — so the switch offering **Français** is not a line of new UI.
+- Tests: `i18n.test.ts` (the Québécois grep; French spacing and guillemets kept in the copy; agreement in the interpolated lines — *1 fleur* / *3 fleurs*, *1 chose retenue* / *5 choses retenues*; the fr false friends *attend* and *pass*, which pt-PT has no use for). `spellchecker.test.ts` gains seven elision cases including both directions of the flag-it/don't rule. `pairlang_test.go` now round-trips **every** shipped pair rather than the first one — the Go allowlist and the frontend's PACKS are two copies of one fact — and its unshipped examples moved to `es`/`fr-CA`. `config_test.go` discovers a fourth voice.
+- Verified: go build/vet, `go test ./...` clean, tsc, vite build, vitest 190/190 (33 in the i18n suite after the review pass). **Not seen in a browser** — no Chrome extension on this laptop; the 1.19 MB dictionary inflating in a real tab and the picker's third entry in a real mobile drawer are what unit tests cannot cover.
+- **Not deployed.** No migration, so it is a rebuild whenever the user wants it; the Piper sidecar wants `docker compose up -d piper-fr` and a voice download on the box.
+
+### Phase 25 (planned) — the es pair
+Everything above, minus the surprises: item 3's expander now handles what Spanish's `es_ES.aff` is likely to need (single-char flags, no compounding), so the work is the langpack, a native review, `hunspell-es` (packaged per country — check what `es_ES` actually is before vendoring), a `piper-es` service with `es_ES-davefx-medium`, and nothing at all for the lexicon: es is the *best*-covered pair in `dict.db` at 68.6%.
 
 ### Later / explicitly not now
 - Learner-facing Chinese writing (the zh pair's second direction) — own phase with its own spec (SUGGESTIONS §4); only after Phases 19–21 prove the pair model
-- ~~Spanish pair — gated on DreamDict growing an es dataset~~ **ungated 2026-07-26** (DreamDict added Spanish). Now a normal follow-on pair after pt-PT, alongside fr — see Phases 20/21.
+- ~~Spanish pair — gated on DreamDict growing an es dataset~~ **ungated 2026-07-26** (DreamDict added Spanish). Now a normal follow-on pair after pt-PT and fr — see Phase 25.
 - Reactive-animation puppy companion — wishlist, low priority; `companions.ts` roster + mood engine is the drop-in point
 - Copyleaks Tier-2 — revisit once Phase 15 provides a public webhook endpoint
 
@@ -332,6 +347,7 @@ Not blockers, and cheap because Phase 19 did them: `internal/llm/lang.go` alread
 - [x] **Phase 14 — companion warmth + bedtime nag + night mode**: more encouraging phrases, a gentle "go to bed" nudge after 11pm, and a calm dark theme + falling stars at night. ✅ (see Phase 14 above)
 
 ## Session log
+- 2026-07-27: **Phase 24 — the fr pair, and a "generalizes" that did not** (user: "resume the build plan"; scope chosen with the user: French end to end, code only, deploy its own step). The plan's five items were meant to be mechanical, and four of them were — the Piper voice is a compose service and two env lines because Phase 21 made a language configuration; the lexicon needed nothing at all, fr having been measured at 63.1% during Phase 20's rebuild, better than the pair that already shipped; the sidebar picker grew a third entry without a line of UI because it derives itself from the shipped packs. **Item 3 was the one that had been recorded as done and wasn't.** `build_ptpt_dictionary.py` was said to generalize; it handled single-character flags and plain PFX/SFX and stopped on everything else, and `fr.aff` uses four of the things it stopped on. `FLAG long` is the dangerous one: French flags are two characters, so the pt-PT reader's `set(flagstr)` yields a bag of unrelated letters and expands every entry through the wrong paradigm without erroring. Plus continuation flags (French really does affix an affixed form), NEEDAFFIX on 68,075 of 84,140 stems, and FULLSTRIP. The rewritten `build_hunspell_dictionary.py` carries a per-language profile and asserts that CIRCUMFIX and FORBIDDENWORD are still unused — and **rebuilds pt-PT byte-identical to the shipped asset**, which is the only thing that makes "generalized" a claim rather than a hope. **The second decision was elision, and it was made by measuring both halves**: keeping `l'arbre` and its thirty-three siblings costs 3,159,832 forms and 8.25 MB gzipped; dropping them costs 473,326 and 1.19 MB. They are not new words, but the tokenizer keeps internal apostrophes, so they really would have been underlined — so they moved out of the dictionary and into `withElision`, which splits at a known clitic and still requires the remainder to be a word (`l'zzzz` stays flagged). Real nspell: 369 ms and 74 MB for the larger language, against pt-PT's 842 ms and 139 MB. **Where the regional trap lives is the mirror image of Portuguese's**: every `fr_*` Piper voice is fr_FR and every Debian fr dictionary is one shared word list, so nothing can be quietly wrong about the country — the whole decision is in the copy, which is why the pack is greped for *courriel* and *magasiner* the way pt-PT is greped for *arquivo*. What French does have instead is the 1990 reform, packaged three ways; Petal ships comprehensive, because Petal never corrects her French and *coût* and *cout* are both correct. go build/vet/test, tsc, vite, vitest 190/190. **Two things owed and both said plainly**: no native speaker has read the pack (SUGGESTIONS §3's bar, unmet for pt-PT too), and nothing here has been seen in a browser. **Then, same session, an interim answer to the first of those** (user: "perhaps for now, we could leverage multiple LLMs to act as reviewers?"): four models reviewed each Latin pack independently, and only findings ≥2 of them reached on their own were applied — five per pack. It earned its keep on the pack that was *already shipped*: pt-PT had **pre-Acordo spellings in a file whose own header commits to post-Acordo**, because the Phase 21 greps checked for Brazilian vocabulary and never checked the pack against its own spelling policy. That grep now exists and was confirmed to fail on the old text. Where reviewers agreed a line was wrong but split on the fix, the wording is mine and the reasoning is in the phase entry rather than averaged away. Still not a native speaker, and both packs now say so precisely.
 - 2026-07-27: **Phase 22 finished — the build plan's last four items, and the LLM stops holding anything hostage** (user: "let's finish the last phase of the build plan"; code only, no VPS work). The four remaining items shared one theme, and it only became visible while building them: **§6's left-hand column is now complete.** Spell, define, gloss, pronounce, catch the common mistakes, review vocabulary, prove authorship — every daily-writing need works with the tunnel down. **The plan asked for "grammar lite as a fourth suggestion family", and the fourth family already existed**: Phase 8's deterministic `mechanics` pass was the plumbing, so this was the rule pack it had been waiting for rather than new machinery — preposition pairs, doubled comparatives, `people is`, plus per-pair L1 interference. **Q6 answered by hand-curating rather than mining LanguageTool**: that corpus is broad because it aims at recall, and this pack aims at the exact opposite, so every entry is a pairing wrong in essentially *all* contexts and the ones only *usually* wrong were left out on purpose — `married with` is a mistake until "married with children", `arrive to` wants at or in depending on the noun, `different than` is ordinary American English. Each rule is pinned in both directions, the guard case being the correct English next to the mistake. **The L1 rules are gated by pair, and the gating is what earns them their confidence** — *ter 30 anos* → "I am 30 years old" is a near-certainty for a Portuguese writer and only a guess for anyone else. The two zh rules the plan itself named are the ones this pack **refuses** to implement: dropped articles and he/she slips are not detectable from text alone ("She said he was late" is perfect whichever pronoun was meant), and flagging them would mean correcting correct writing. **The miscollocation list forced the session's one real design change.** It had to file as `collocation` rather than as its own family — same rail, same phrasing, and an accepted chunk plants in the garden exactly as the coach's would — but `type` had been quietly doubling as the answer to *which engine found this*, and that breaks the instant an offline rule proposes a collocation. Migration `0013_suggestion_source` splits the two apart: each pass now scopes its DELETE by engine, and the span tiebreak moved with it (an exact offline card beats an overlapping LLM one by source, not by type — an offline miscollocation is as exact as an offline comma). Without it the coach silently wiped every offline chunk on the page and the offline pass left the coach's rows to pile up; both directions are now tested, and a pre-0013 collocation row correctly backfills to the coach, since the offline list did not exist yet. **The daily invitation's whole substance is one stored date** — no count, no run of days, nothing that gets worse for being away, so a month away reads exactly like a day away; it lives in its own file because that is the property this feature would lose silently, and the test is named for it rather than for the query. Both answers spend the day's invitation, because being asked again after "not today" would make no a negotiation. **False friends are the one thing here that never becomes a card**: ~19 curated en↔pt entries, shown as a lavender block above the WordCard's definition and as at most one companion note per pass, with no `fix` anywhere — *actually* may well be the word she meant, and this is the mistake that makes a learner feel foolish rather than merely corrected. zh has none, which is the honest answer and not an unwritten one: the trap needs a shared script. Copy for the invitation and the false friends is greped by tests the same way the journal's is (*streak / in a row / 连续 / todos os dias*; *wrong / mistake / errado*) — the framing is the feature, and it is the part a future edit would undo while meaning well. Verified: go build/vet, `go test ./internal/...` clean, tsc, vite build, vitest 172/172 (30 new rule cases, 7 invitation, plus false-friend shape/tone guards), and a live throwaway DB on :8099 with **no LLM configured at all** — offline `did a mistake` → card → accept → garden card *made a mistake*, example bounded to its own corrected sentence, journal `kept:1`. ⚠️ **Not deployed and not seen in a browser**, and this one carries a migration, so it is a deploy rather than a rebuild. The pt-PT copy added here joins the pack a native speaker still has not reviewed.
 - 2026-07-27: **Phase 21 deployed — the pt-PT pair has a voice** (user: "continue the build plan"; scope chosen: deploy Phase 21 to the VPS rather than start Phase 22). The plan's remaining line was "Piper pt-PT voice instance on parodia", and it hid two things. **A language was still a code change**: read-aloud knew exactly two, named in the Config struct as `TTSEndpointZH`/`TTSVoiceZH`, so adding Portuguese meant editing Go to add Portuguese. Petal now discovers its Piper instances from the environment — English keeps the unsuffixed pair, everything else is `TTS_ENDPOINT_<LANG>`/`TTS_VOICE_<LANG>`, base tag only because an env var name cannot hold pt-PT's hyphen — and a language configured by halves is dropped rather than routed, so it reaches the client as "no voice, use Web Speech" instead of erroring on every tap. fr and es now cost a compose service and two `.env` lines. **And the voice itself repeated Phase 21's own lesson in a new place**: `pt_PT-tugão-medium` is the *only* European Portuguese voice in Piper's catalogue — the other five are Brazilian — so, exactly as with `dictionary-pt` packaging VERO, the default anyone reaches for ships the wrong country. Then it wouldn't download at all: `piper.download_voices` pastes the voice name into the HTTP request line and `http.client` encodes that as ASCII, so it dies with `UnicodeEncodeError` on the *ã* before a byte leaves the container — a failure that lands on precisely the one voice this pair needs and on no other. The entrypoint falls back to fetching the model and its config itself with the path percent-encoded, which is all the downloader was missing. **The slow replay** (§5e) went in while there: `slow: true` raises `length_scale` to ~4/3, and the pace is part of the **cache key** — without that, asking to hear slowly a word already heard at speed serves the fast clip back, which is the one request where the difference is the entire point. **The L1 voice asks the pack, not the letters**: a new `locale` field, because "comum" is spelled the same in both halves and a detector would have to guess — the same reason the gloss shows both directions. **Deploying is what finally ran the reverse lookup against real data**, the item the previous session left open because this laptop has no `dict.db`: *data* → "date", *comum* → "common; usual", *tarde* → "evening; afternoon", *ali* → "there", with *think*, *computer* and *garden* correctly silent; and *think* glossing to **pensar** first confirms Phase 20's sense-agreement ordering on the real 550 MB database rather than on a fixture. zh flipped back is byte-for-byte ECDICT again. go build/vet/test, tsc, vitest 125/125, vite; laptop smoke against two fake Pipers, then the real thing on the box. Her data untouched: 8 documents, 33 versions, 103 suggestions, FTS matching, integrity ok, `schema_migrations` still at 11 (no migration in this phase). **Two things Phase 21 still owes, both said plainly**: the pack has not been read by a pt-PT speaker, and no pt-PT account exists — both writers are on the zh pair, so nothing she sees changed today and the browser half of the Portuguese experience has never had a human in front of it.
 - 2026-07-27: **Phase 21 (code half) — the pt-PT pair, and the plan's one-line assumption about the dictionary** (user: "let's continue the build plan"; scope confirmed: code only, the Piper voice and the deploy deferred, the pack written but flagged unreviewed). The plan said "Hunspell pt-PT vendored like en-US", and that turned out to be the load-bearing sentence. **nspell expands affixes eagerly on construction** — it materialises every surface form the moment you build it. English survives that; European Portuguese's 1,340 affix rules over 44,257 stems do not. Measured before deciding anything: ~340 MB of heap for the first 12,000 entries, and no return at all after three minutes on the whole file — over a gigabyte, in a browser, on a tablet. So the expansion moved to build time: `scripts/build_ptpt_dictionary.py` writes 1,039,058 forms, 2.66 MB gzipped, which the *same* nspell then reads in 842 ms using ~120 MB, and the runtime path stays byte-for-byte the English one. The `.aff` keeps only TRY/KEY/REP/MAP, which shape corrections rather than membership, so "telemovel" still corrects to "telemóvel". **A second thing the obvious route would have got wrong quietly**: npm's `dictionary-pt` is not European Portuguese — both it and `dictionary-pt-br` package VERO (Brasil), so vendoring the obvious package name ships Brazilian spellings under a pt-PT label. That is §3's pt-BR drift arriving through the *packaging* rather than through the model, and nobody reviewing the diff would see it. The real source is Projecto Natura's, packaged as `hunspell-pt-pt`; the build script now asserts the fault lines (`receção`/`húmido`/`pensámos` in, `recepção`/`úmido`/`ônibus`/`óptimo` out) before it writes a byte, and a vitest greps the built langpack for *sinônimo*, *arquivo*, *tela*, *você*. **Both-dictionaries spellcheck** landed as §3a specifies — flag only what every loaded dictionary rejects, interleave the correction pills so English can't fill all five — and dragged a smaller thing with it: the tokenizer had to become a property of the checker rather than a constant, because `[A-Za-z]` cuts "coração" into "cora", which is both silently unchecked *and* what a right-click would have looked up. The wide alphabet stays off for a writer with no Latin second language, where it could only earn her new squiggles. **Gloss both directions**: a Latin pair has no script boundary, so *data*, *sale* and *comum* are words on both sides and there is no honest way to know which she meant — Petal asks both and shows what answers, which needs no detector and therefore cannot be wrong about her writing. The reverse direction deliberately skips the English de-inflection walk, which over Portuguese would be right by accident and wrong by rule. **Writing the tests found the bug**: `extendedAlphabet` was a snapshot taken when the checker was built while `correct`/`suggest` read live — and her dictionary arrives *after* English, so the underlines would have been right while every lookup still resolved "cora". go build/vet/test, tsc, vite, vitest 116/116 clean; the shipped asset loaded in a real nspell; live smoke on a throwaway DB served both files and left the zh lookup untouched. **Two things outstanding and both said plainly**: the pack has *not* been read by a pt-PT speaker (SUGGESTIONS §3's own bar, and not one I can meet), and this laptop has no `dict.db`, so the reverse-lookup path is covered by a fixture rather than by a real collision — the first of those happens on the VPS.