Part 1: A name is a word

The doctrine lives in manual ch9 §5 and ch21, and canon settles it in one sentence: a person's name is a lexicon word borne as a name, announced by ne. Phi has no separate stock of name-syllables, no register of sounds reserved for people. Someone is walking around being warmth. Someone is being seed. Here is the recurring cast of the manual and the primer, and the words they carry:

The founding pair

The whole system is audible in two lines, identical but for one syllable:

mia thinoe nila.
1SG seed see.
(I see a seed.)

mia ne thinoe nila.
1SG NAME thinoe see.
(I see thinoe.)

Nothing about the syllables changed. What changed is the sentence's population: ne announced that these particular syllables are someone, and a person appeared where a seed had been. Notice the gloss line change too: seed became thinoe. A name is carried, not translated; the moment a word becomes a name, its meaning steps back and its bearer steps forward.

What follows from this

Because names are words, everything the language already does for words it does for names. The collision rules protect them: no one's name can sit one sound away from a neighbor's and cause confusion. The validator checks them like any vocabulary, with no whitelist of exceptions. Anyone can bear any word, and the language can never run out of names. And every introduction is a small vocabulary lesson: meet sulae and you have met warm; the person teaches you the word by proving it daily.

Because names are announced rather than capitalized, no name outranks the sentence it stands in. Phi has no capital letters (not for sentences, not for names, in any mode of writing), and Part 6 takes up what that means for the writer. For now, one sentence of canon carries the idea: what capitals do for names, ne does aloud.

Drill: word or someone

Cover everything below the line. For each sentence, say aloud whether the cast-word is vocabulary or a person, and how you know.

1. mia sulae sulopa nuola.
2. ne siora seniku.
3. muila lo thinoe howela.
4. siora shua.

Answers: 1. vocabulary: I eat warm soup; no announcement, and soup is exactly the kind of thing warmth modifies. 2. a person: siora smiles; ne said so before the name arrived. 3. vocabulary: the earth receives the seeds; plural-marked things in the earth are seeds, not children. 4. undecidable alone: joy comes, or, in a family room where she is already known, siora comes. That undecidability is not a flaw; it is the whole case for ne, and Part 5 is about the one register allowed to run the risk.