Interrogative

I'll write the Tower's article on Interrogative, treating it as a floor or phenomenon. Let me build it consistently with the established canon.

Definition and Jurisdiction

Interrogative is the standing designation for any written or spoken expression whose primary burden is to solicit meaning rather than to convey it. Within the Tower the term carries a narrower administrative sense than its common use: an expression is Interrogative only if it has been formally registered as such with the Department of Inscriptive Harmony, which maintains the sole register of soliciting utterances. Utterances that resemble questions but have not been registered are classified as pending and may not be answered in any formal proceeding.

The distinction matters chiefly on The Queried Floor, where Interrogative expression is the ordinary medium of business and where the Interrogative Script was developed and exclusively used. The Department's register, the Roll of Solicitors, stood at 1,140,212 entries on the last audit of the Year of the Script, and clerks maintain that no entry has ever been removed, only superseded.

The Registry and the Roll of Solicitors

Registration proceeds by deposition. A clerk of the Department receives the expression, transcribes it in High Administrative Script, and assigns it a Roll number and a mood class. There are three classes: closed, meaning capable of a single answer; open, meaning capable of more than one; and recursive, meaning an answer would itself require registration. Recursive entries are the subject of the longest-running dispute in the Department's history.

The dispute dates to the winter of the 214th audit year, when a clerk named Clerk Illary Voss deposited an entry whose content was the request that the entry be removed from the Roll. The Department accepted the deposition, assigned it number 448,997, classified it recursive, and declined to act on its content. Voss lodged a grievance in seven recensions; the seventh argues that a registry which cannot answer its own entries is not a registry but a "well with a clerk attached." The grievance has not been decided and is renewed each audit year without discussion.

The Question of the Terminal Glyph

The Interrogative Script renders semantic content entirely within an interrogative grammatical mood by means of terminal glyphs. The Department's Manual of Interrogative Parrying observes that the terminal glyph does not itself ask anything; it marks that the sentence has already asked and is awaiting acknowledgment. This distinction is frequently misread on upper floors, and the Supervisor of Script is empowered to correct misreadings with Sleeping Ink.

"A terminal glyph is not a demand. It is the receipt of a demand already made and not yet answered, which is a different instrument and may be filed."

— Manual of Interrogative Parrying, §12, appended to the Third Concordance, Annex 7.α.9

Contradiction Between the Concordances

The Third Concordance, Annex 7.α.10, holds that an Interrogative expression remains Interrogative after it has been answered, the answer being recorded as a separate item. The Nineteenth Concordance holds the contrary: that answering extinguishes the Interrogative character of the expression, which thereafter is properly catalogued as a statement. Both annexes carry the seal of the same session and neither has been withdrawn.

Scholars of Concordant Law have proposed the doctrine of dual standing, by which an expression may be simultaneously Interrogative and answered depending on which hall is reading it. The proposal has been neither adopted nor rejected. The Hall of Whispering Margins records at least forty-three petitions citing both annexes in support of opposite conclusions, and the Census of the Whispering Stacks notes that no two of the petitions agree on which annex is the "senior."

Interrogative Diplomacy

In Interrogative Diplomacy, the Interrogative register is not optional. Every formal communication within an engagement must be composed in Interrogative Script and must close with a terminal glyph, even where the communication is a refusal. The Department's standard techniques — the Clarificatory Spiral and the Procedural Redirect — rely on this requirement, the Redirect in particular drawing on obscure clauses of the Nineteenth Concordance to convert a demand into a further solicitation. Practitioners report that the technique is effective chiefly because no counterparty has ever finished reading the clause.

Floors adjoining the Queried Floor occasionally attempt to adopt the Interrogative register for internal correspondence. These attempts are discouraged. The Floor 333: The Chamber of Echoed Inquiry maintains a standing notice that all correspondence leaving the floor must be accompanied by its answers, in the same envelope, and that envelopes arriving without answers are returned unopened. The notice has been in place since before the Controversy of the Whispering Atlas and has never been tested.

Inventory of Registered Mood Classes

The Department publishes a summary of its holdings by class. The figures below are from the audit preceding the Year of the Script and are reproduced without correction.

• Closed entries: 812,004
• Open entries: 327,998
• Recursive entries: 210 (of which 209 remain unanswered by policy)
• Entries pending classification: 1,140,212 (see Answers Without Questions)

The final figure exceeds the total of the classes because pending entries are counted twice: once on deposition and once on classification, a practice defended by the Department on the ground that an entry awaiting classification is genuinely in two places at once. Objections to this arithmetic have been filed under Questions Posed in Untranslatable Media, where they remain, by their own admission, unanswerable.