the assay office / record

After Z Comes Å

Written 2026-08-24. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 11 checked, 7 confirmed, 4 wrong, 0 unverifiable. By claims-audit controls 2026-09-27 (audit agent + fix agent).

Verifier `node research/after-z-comes-a-ring/verify-after-z-comes-a-ring.mjs`: 110 passed, 0 failed before and after; `--mutate` 4/0 before and after. The German fix is a relabel only (the audit's preferred route): the table, fold map, weights and every shelf order are unchanged, so the page's orders are now correct for the convention it names. The internal id `de-phone` is kept so the blind-reconciliation records (battery.json, engine-b.mjs, reconcile-report.json) still match; the page says the id is a leftover name.

Claims

• CONFIRMED Swedish types å, ä, ö after z
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order : "three extra vowels placed at its end (..., X, Y, Z, Å, Ä, Ö)"
• WRONG the German table that files umlauts as base vowels is "the telephone-directory treatment", and ä as ae "the dictionary treatment"
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_alphabet : base-letter folding (DIN 5007-1) is preferred for dictionaries; ae/oe/ue (called DIN 5007-2 there) for names and telephone directories; de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetische_Sortierung puts both in DIN 5007-1 as variants 1 (words) and 2 (name lists)
• MINOR Swedish å, ä, ö are "elements 27, 28 and 29, after z at 26"
  public/strata/after-z-comes-a-ring/index.html : the page's own chips and sort-key readout are 0-indexed (z 25, å 26); the ordinals are right only as 1-based counts
• CONFIRMED Welsh ch dd ff ng ll ph rh th are single letters; order a b c ch d dd e f ff g ng h i j l ll m n o p ph r rh s t th u w y
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_orthography : same 29-letter list; la < ly < lla < ma
• WRONG each Welsh digraph ranks "just after its first component"
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_orthography : ng follows g, not n (the typed table always had it after g; only the prose was wrong)
• CONFIRMED ß files as ss
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_alphabet : "Eszett is sorted as though it were ss"
• CONFIRMED letter-by-letter filing ignores spaces; word-by-word files a whole first word first
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order : Oak precedes Oakley word by word; letter by letter ignores spaces
• CONFIRMED Spanish stopped treating ch and ll as separate letters in 1994
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order : RAE alphabetization rule of 1994; wording tightened to "alphabetizing" to match (they left the alphabet itself only in 2010)
• MINOR Dutch ij as a single letter is historical practice
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order : formerly collated as y, now mostly two letters, "Exceptions are phone directories; IJ is always collated as Y here"
• CONFIRMED whether j is a full Welsh letter was historically contested
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_orthography : j "has only recently entered", formally introduced 1987
• CONFIRMED for these names UTF-8 byte order, UTF-16 code-unit order and code-point order coincide
  public/strata/after-z-comes-a-ring/index.html : every character in the aw-tables names is below U+0100, where all three orders agree

What was done

• [fixed] HIGH, German conventions swapped: relabelled the base-vowel-folding table "German dictionary" (DIN 5007-1 variant 1) in the dek, plain, seoDescription, meta/og/twitter/JSON-LD descriptions, body, check panel, verdict sentences, engine.mjs label, verifier check names and README; the ae treatment is now named as the name-list/telephone-directory convention; the "source needed" DIN note replaced with the two Wikipedia sources; dated Corrected line on the page
• [fixed] MINOR, Swedish element numbering: prose now gives the 27th to 29th elements with weights 26 to 28 and z at weight 25, matching the displayed 0-indexed table; dated Corrected line
• [fixed] ng placement (found by the fix agent): prose, engine.mjs and README now say each digraph follows its first component except ng, which follows g; dated Corrected line
• [fixed] Dutch ij (found by the fix agent): now "mostly historical practice, surviving in telephone directories"; dated Corrected line