N'Ko as Computational Infrastructure — Program Map

> Front door for the whole research line. One thesis, several pillars, one release plan. > Last updated: 2026-05-28. **N'Ko is not a decorative or interchangeable rendering of Manding. For machine-learning systems it is computational infrastructure.** A designed, bijective, tone-marking script changes four things that are usually treated as fixed: 1. **What models can represent** — tokenizers and hidden circuits behave differently on N'Ko than on Latin Bambara. 2. **How acoustic evidence aligns to symbols** — a phoneme-transparent target changes CTC decoding. 3. **Whether a reported error rate is meaningful** — N'Ko CER is phonemically interpretable in a way Latin WER is not. 4. **How sound itself can be encoded** — the same script that makes recognition interpretable makes a featural acoustic code possible. The trajectory geometry `z_t` is reused at three levels — decode, govern, correct. This is the same figure that anchors the FAC tone-resolution paper. The program is **three linguistic pillars** plus an **orthogonal systems track**. Read the linguistic pillars as the science; read the systems track as "how we trained it cheaply." Do not mix them in the narrative.