N'Ko Speech Stack — System Architecture Ledger

This file prevents the program from looking like a sequence of overwritten ideas. The work has not been reset; it has compressed into layers. Each experiment either became a system component, a constraint, or a publishable negative result. N'Ko speech becomes infrastructure when a clean script-native ASR anchor emits N'Ko, a deterministic edit/ranker layer performs bounded harm-free correction, and the whole path is served offline on iOS through CoreML, with ANE/TurboQuant reserved for the heavy encoder/compression layer. Do not treat the newest benchmark as replacing the older work. Treat it as assigning older work to a clearer layer. A result can end in four valid states: 1. **Component:** it remains in the serving/research path. 2. **Constraint:** it becomes a rule that prevents a repeat failure. 3. **Negative result:** it becomes publishable evidence about what not to build. 4. **Parked branch:** it remains outside the first phone proof, but feeds the broader speech system later. The current phone stack is only the narrow serving spine. The larger architecture also keeps the representation papers, metric argument, uncertainty packet, provenance corpus, speaker atlas, search/TTS branch, tone/phonemic-substrate work, and meaning flywheel.