Extension to Non-Greek Characters

The Extension to Non-Greek Characters is a standing interpretive instruction governing the admission of alphabetic signage into the designation registers of The Tower. In its mature form it provides that Greek letters may serve as designators only where a documented prior usage exists, and that every other alphabetic character — Cyrillic, Coptic, runic, and the various cursive hands — must be examined individually by a competent registrar before it may be entered, a procedure with no recorded completion date. The Extension is administered jointly by the Curatorial Corps and the Office of Designation, whose relations have not been cordial since the Winter of the Split Register.

Origin and text

The Extension first appears as clause 9 of the Third Concordance, where it is appended to the same annex that assigns non-Roman alphabetic characters to Floor Na under Clause 202. The two provisions were drafted in different hands and do not obviously acknowledge one another. Clause 202 appears to assume that the characters have already been sorted; clause 9 insists that sorting is the whole of the labour. Clerks who work between them describe the arrangement as "a door hinged to a window" — a phrase credited to Registrar-Ordinary Vess Tallow, though the Annals of Jurisprudence record it twice, once unattributed.

"Greek, being already in the house, need not knock. What arrives from elsewhere shall knock, and be answered in the order it knocked."

— Third Concordance, clause 9

The metaphor of knocks proved ill-advised. By the second century of the Extension's operation, a queue of characters had formed in the intake ledger which no office claimed authority to move, and the queue is still there, in order, at the head of which stands the Scottish thorn and a Hurrian syllabic sign admitted there by clerical error.

The Greek presumption

The Extension's allowance for Greek rests on the Ordinance of Perpetual Echo, which employed Greek letters in its formal title long before the Extension was written. That prior usage is treated as having naturalized the entire Greek alphabet in advance; a Greek designator is therefore entered on the registrar's authority alone. The practical consequence is that Floor Ω-3, the Ω-series edict, Series Ω edict, the Fourth Concordance, Appendix Ω, and Supplement Ψ all proceed without reference to the Extension at all, and their file clerks to this day return Extension paperwork unopened with the endorsement "not applicable, Greek."

The presumption has been stretched. In the fourth year of the current recension, a clerk in the Delta intake argued that the letter delta, being Greek, could be used to designate a non-Greek hand-provided glyph on the ground that the glyph resembled a triangle. The petition, filed on Form 44-Δ, was refused; the refusal was itself written on Form 44-Δ, which the petitioner contested as a category error under the Axiom of Material Coherence. The Annals of Jurisprudence preserve the whole exchange, and an accompanying entry on the confusion between the Alpha glyph and other characters, without which the episode is difficult to follow.

Objections of the Latinist party

A persistent minority position, associated with the Latinist reading-room on the fourteenth gallery, holds that the Extension is not about Greek at all but about the Latin alphabet's own letters, and that the Third Concordance's clause 9 has been misread for as long as it has been cited. On this account the word "Greek" in the clause refers not to the alphabet but to a particular scribal hand long since fallen out of use, and the Extension properly governs the admission of the plain letters A to Z, which would make every floor designation in the Tower technically irregular.

No Librarian has endorsed the Latinist position in writing. It is nonetheless taught, and its partisans point out that Series Ω edict and the Ω-series edict are catalogued separately for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, which they take as evidence that the register is already unreliable in exactly the way they describe. The Office of Designation has declined to hear the argument on the ground that hearing it would require the office to determine what its own records mean, a function it does not possess.

The Winter of the Split Register

The most serious disruption attributable to the Extension occurred in a winter whose year is given differently in three sources. A registrar entering a Coptic shorthand into the intake ledger used a character that, on one reading, duplicated an existing Greek entry and, on another, was a wholly new designation. Rather than resolve the question, the ledger was divided: the Greek reading was bound into the main register and the Coptic reading into a Lateral Annex, and both were declared authoritative. The two volumes have drifted apart ever since. A designation cited in one frequently cannot be found in the other, and correspondence between the two offices now passes through a coincidental stairwell whose lower landing opens onto the annex and whose upper landing opens onto a reading room that closed before the split.

The split was eventually addressed by Concordance 22clause 4, which permits the extension of a shelf's temporal span where the petitioner can show ongoing and non-redundant hermeneutic engagement with its holdings. Filing under it requires Form TSE-11γ, the request form better known as the Request for Temporal Shelf Extension, and the form's guidance notes carry the only instruction the Extension itself has never supplied: that an application must name the character under dispute, and that applications naming more than one character will be returned. Registrars have learned to file separately for the thorn and the syllabic sign.

Status

The Extension remains in force and remains unfinished. Its queue has not advanced since the split, its Greek allowance is uncontested, and its non-Greek procedure exists in draft only. The Curatorial Corps treats the Extension as an extension of the Curatorial Practice and thus subject to ordinary shelf rotation, though no shelf has ever been found to hold it. The Residual Intent Hypothesis, proposed as an extension of The Residual Hypothesis, suggests that the Extension's drafters intended a procedure they never wrote down, and that the queue's order is itself the missing instruction. The Precedential Suggestion has been invoked against this reading, and against the reading that would close the queue entirely, and against a third reading no one now remembers. The question remains before the Concordance. Petitioners are advised that the intake desk does not accept Coptic shorthand after the ninth bell.