Hermeneutics.
Reading a sentence in its world.

Many sentences of a historical source presuppose knowledge the text does not state: which day a date in an old calendar was, where a planet stood, what the tables of the time said it should be. Famulus answers such questions with specialists, services that compute and cite instead of guessing. The workspace hermeneutic-experts holds 2 of them, a calendar specialist and an astronomical specialist (1,839 lines).

The astronomical specialist answers a position question twice. The table reading is what a named historical model gives for the date; the sky reading is what a modern ephemeris gives for the same instant. The difference is kept beside the two numbers, because it is evidence about the text: many ancient records were computed from the tables then current. A model whose parameters have not been read off a page is marked pending and raises an error; it does not borrow a number from another model.

Each comparison is a gate that was run and written to a file; a registry row is not a gate. The specialist’s documentation lists the gates and their measured results: table reading and sky reading, measured gates.

The footnotes of the normaliser say what each expression stands for. An explication says what the whole sentence means: its meaning in prose, what it is about, the speech act, polarity and modality, its time against the date of the letter, the referents with their grounds and the readings that were rejected, a segmentation into phrases, and the questions the page does not settle. The instruction is an external skill file (explicate); the model may only choose candidates the evidence pack lists, and every ground names the pack item it rests on.

A critic reads the explication against the same pack and lists what is still unresolved. The gate that accepts a reading is deterministic and does not trust the model’s own verdict. A sentence is not called true or false: the proposition it expresses is. A gap is never filled with a guess; it stays an open question, and the reader sees it as such. In the Kármán viewer this explication is what a marked phrase opens; 206 readings are stored.

The statement model of famulus-normalisation (1,800 lines) holds subject, predicate, object, time and register for one statement; its draft Famulus normalisation and its documentation describe it. It is to be merged with the sentence record so that one store carries footnotes, explications and statements.