The es pair, and a dictionary that was quietly Spain's

Phase 25. Spanish was never built — the groundwork was all [x] (DreamDict
data, the prompt language, the L1 rule gating, TTS env-discovery), which is
why the plan read as though it had shipped. shippedPairs was the honest
answer: the server had been refusing es on purpose.

The langpack is neutral Latin American, chosen with the user: tú, ustedes,
no vosotros, and the pan-American half of every vocabulary split. A vitest
greps for the peninsular twins the way fr is greped for québécismes —
including coger, which is not merely regional but obscene through most of
Latin America.

The dictionary is the story. Debian's hunspell-es symlinks twenty country
codes to one file, which reads as pan-Hispanic; RLA publishes twenty-four
builds per release, one per country plus a generic es that is the union,
and Debian ships peninsular es_ES. The 58,622-form gap is essentially
voseo, so the first version of this commit underlined vení and tenés as
misspellings and called it a considered gap.

The MUST_ACCEPT list was written to catch exactly that and structurally
could not: it asserted the pan-Hispanic vocabulary, and every RLA variant
carries the full pan-Hispanic vocabulary — only the paradigms are
localised. The REP table cited as the second witness is shared by all
builds too. Two independent-looking proofs, neither able to distinguish
anything, agreeing with each other.

The profile now demands what discriminates, each verified against the build
it targets: voseo rejects es_ES and Debian, vosotros rejects es_MX, and
arepa/chévere/bacán reject es_AR, which has both paradigms and would
otherwise pass. 717,640 forms, 1.74 MB gzipped, 762 ms / 97 MB in a real
nspell. fr and pt-PT rebuild byte-identical from their own upstream debs,
so the shared script still means what it meant.

Shipping the union is fr's call arrived at from the other side: coût and
cout are both correct French, tienes and tenés are both correct Spanish.
The dictionary holds every variety because underlining is all it can do;
the copy picks a register because speaking requires one.

Reviewed by four models at the usual >=2-of-4 threshold, 5 of 27 findings
applied — one catching the bedtime proverb as fr's Qui dort dîne calqued
into Spanish, gloss and all, which is the rule the fr header states. One
below-threshold finding (a missing ¡, seen by 1 of 4 because an absent
opening mark has no closing ! to look wrong against) was applied and turned
into an assertion instead: the suite now rejects any native line that
closes ? or ! without opening one.

piper-es on es_MX-ald-medium, not the es_ES-davefx-medium the plan named —
six of Piper's nine Spanish voices are peninsular, so the obvious pick was
the pt-PT trap through a different door.

go build/vet/test, tsc, vite, vitest 251/251.

Not deployed, not seen in a browser, not read by a native speaker, and no
es account exists.

internal/auth/pairlang_test.go

@@ -41,6 +41,13 @@ func TestSetPairLang(t *testing.T) {
 		t.Fatalf("pair_lang = %q, want fr", u.PairLang)
 	}
 
+	if err := users.SetPairLang("bob", "es"); err != nil {
+		t.Fatalf("set es: %v", err)
+	}
+	if u, _ := users.Get("bob"); u.PairLang != "es" {
+		t.Fatalf("pair_lang = %q, want es", u.PairLang)
+	}
+
 	// And back — a writer who tries a pair and doesn't like it must be able to
 	// return, which is the whole reason the picker exists.
 	if err := users.SetPairLang("bob", "zh"); err != nil {
@@ -56,10 +63,13 @@ func TestSetPairLang(t *testing.T) {
 func TestSetPairLangRejectsUnshippedPairs(t *testing.T) {
 	_, users, _ := newStores(t)
 
-	// "es" is the real case here — the pair whose pack has not been written yet.
-	// "pt-BR" is the near-miss that matters most: a Brazilian code must not be
-	// quietly served European copy and a European voice.
-	for _, lang := range []string{"es", "pt-BR", "fr-CA", "klingon", "", "  "} {
+	// The near-misses are the ones that matter, and there are two of them now.
+	// "pt-BR" must not be quietly served European copy and a European voice;
+	// "es-ES" is the same mistake pointing the other way, because the es pack is
+	// deliberately Latin American and reads itself aloud in a Mexican voice. A
+	// regional code Petal has not decided about is refused rather than rounded
+	// to the nearest pack it happens to have.
+	for _, lang := range []string{"es-ES", "pt-BR", "fr-CA", "de", "klingon", "", "  "} {
 		if err := users.SetPairLang("bob", lang); err == nil {
 			t.Fatalf("stored unshipped pair %q", lang)
 		}
@@ -98,7 +108,7 @@ func TestUpdateMeHandlerRejects(t *testing.T) {
 	_, users, _ := newStores(t)
 
 	for name, body := range map[string]string{
-		"unshipped pair": `{"pair_lang":"es"}`,
+		"unshipped pair": `{"pair_lang":"es-ES"}`,
 		"missing field":  `{}`,
 		"not json":       `pt-PT`,
 	} {

internal/auth/users.go

@@ -76,8 +76,13 @@ func (u *UserStore) MeHandler() http.HandlerFunc {
 // this one names the pairs Petal can render itself in, which requires a langpack
 // on the frontend. Accepting a code with no pack would leave her looking at
 // Chinese with no way back except another guess, so the server refuses it. es
-// joins this list on the day its pack lands, not before.
-var shippedPairs = []string{"zh", "pt-PT", "fr"}
+// joined on the day its pack landed, not before.
+//
+// These four are now every pair PairLang names on the frontend, which makes the
+// two lists look redundant. They are not: the next pair will exist in the type
+// and in the prompts long before it has copy, and this list is the one that
+// says a writer may actually be sent there.
+var shippedPairs = []string{"zh", "pt-PT", "fr", "es"}
 
 func pairIsShipped(lang string) bool {
 	for _, p := range shippedPairs {

internal/config/config_test.go

@@ -16,6 +16,8 @@ func TestTTSVoicesDiscovery(t *testing.T) {
 		"TTS_VOICE_PT=pt_PT-tugão-medium",
 		"TTS_ENDPOINT_FR=http://piper-fr:5000",
 		"TTS_VOICE_FR=fr_FR-siwis-medium",
+		"TTS_ENDPOINT_ES=http://piper-es:5000",
+		"TTS_VOICE_ES=es_MX-ald-medium",
 		// Noise that must not become a language.
 		"TTS_PATH=/synthesize",
 		"PATH=/usr/bin",
@@ -30,6 +32,10 @@ func TestTTSVoicesDiscovery(t *testing.T) {
 		// Phase 24's whole TTS change: a fourth language costs two lines here
 		// and a compose service, and no Go at all.
 		"fr": {"http://piper-fr:5000", "fr_FR-siwis-medium"},
+		// And a fifth cost exactly the same, which is the claim actually being
+		// tested. The voice is Mexican on purpose: the es pack is Latin
+		// American, and es_ES-davefx-medium would read it in the wrong accent.
+		"es": {"http://piper-es:5000", "es_MX-ald-medium"},
 	}
 	if len(voices) != len(want) {
 		t.Fatalf("discovered %v, want %v", voices, want)