feat: naming, localisation and the rebuilt printed output

colitur computed the calendar correctly and could not say what it had
computed. A printed ordo read ef-septuagesima-sunday-2 where a reader
expects Dominica in Sexagesima, and the wall calendar showed slugs in
every cell.

  lib/naming    a language table and a config file, both pure and total,
                parsing the INI reader Overlay_ini already had
  lang/         la.ini and en.ini -- 725 names, every one transcribed
                from the 1962 Missal and citing the line it came from
  templates     the ordo rebuilt as an A5 booklet: one week per page, a
                table of contents, framed days, a colour swatch; the wall
                calendar now fills its sheet instead of a quarter of it
  tools         check_citations.py verifies all 400 citations resolve,
                with 33 self-tests of its own

Names resolve through lang -> declared fallback -> the slug, so a partial
translation is usable from its first line and the fully degraded case is
the old output rather than a blank page.

colitur day and colitur readings are BYTE-IDENTICAL to before, verified
against main rather than asserted; --lang, --raw and the lang/config
subcommands are still to come, and man/colitur-templates.5 still
documents the pre-naming view, so writing a custom template needs the
source until that lands.

1 files changed, 642 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/tools/check_citations.py b/tools/check_citations.py
new file mode 100755
index 0000000..688b00e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tools/check_citations.py
@@ -0,0 +1,642 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
+"""check_citations.py -- verify every "LT.txt:<n>" citation in lang/la.ini
+actually resolves to the Latin text it claims, in docs/research/LT.txt.
+
+Run via `make check-citations` (or directly: `python3 tools/check_citations.py
+[--file LA_INI] [--lt-file LT_TXT]`). Exits 2 with a report if any citation
+looks WRONG, is MALFORMED, or CANNOT BE VERIFIED; exits 0 (with a summary
+line) only if every citation checked out cleanly; exits 0 with a loud
+"SKIPPED" line if docs/research/LT.txt is not present (it is gitignored --
+see below).
+
+THIS SCRIPT WAS ITSELF FOUND TO BE SELF-POISONING (2026-08-19) AND HARDENED
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+An earlier version pooled distinctive words from the whole COMMENT BLOCK
+around a citation, including any double-quoted phrase the comment happened
+to mention -- and comments routinely quote a WRONG historical value while
+explaining a past fix (e.g. "CORRECTED: previously cited LT.txt:12459,
+which is 'Dominica ultima Octobris', not this heading"). That quote landed
+in the pool, so re-introducing the exact bug being documented -- citing
+LT.txt:12459 again -- matched the very quote correcting it, and the script
+reported "0 look wrong". A verification tool whose own documentation of a
+fix defeats the check for that fix is worse than no tool: it manufactures
+false confidence. Proven with a reproduction: reintroducing that one wrong
+citation into a real copy of lang/la.ini produced zero findings on the
+pre-hardening script. Four changes closed this, in order of how directly
+each one addresses the reproduction:
+
+  1. THE POOL IS SCOPED TO THE CITATION'S OWN ENTRY, never to the
+     surrounding comment's quoted text. A citation is verified against the
+     name it claims, not against anything quoted nearby -- see
+     `distinctive_words` / the per-citation `pool_items` construction
+     below. This alone closes the reproduced bug (see `test_check_citations.py`'s
+     own `test_self_poisoning_quote_does_not_pass`).
+  2. A POOL TOO THIN TO VERIFY FAILS CLOSED (round 1's shape; round 2
+     replaced the mechanism -- see below -- but kept the discipline: no
+     match is ever reported as a silent PASS just because nothing better
+     was checked).
+  3. NO MORE BLANKET +-2-LINE TOLERANCE. A citation is checked at the EXACT
+     line it names. A heading that genuinely spans more than one physical
+     line in the source must say so explicitly, "LT.txt:8609-8610" -- the
+     allowance moves into the data, where a reader (and a future citation
+     added nearby) can see it, instead of silently forgiving ANY citation
+     within two lines of the truth. A bare "LT.txt:N" is checked at line N
+     only.
+  4. THIS SCRIPT NOW HAS ITS OWN TEST SUITE (test_check_citations.py,
+     wired into `dune test` via tools/dune's own runtest rule) -- the
+     single most important change. The reproduced bug survived as long as
+     it did specifically BECAUSE nothing exercised this script's own
+     logic against a known-wrong citation. The self-poisoning case above
+     is now a permanent regression test.
+
+ROUND 2 (2026-08-19): A REVIEW DEFEATED ROUND 1 AGAIN -- FIVE MORE FIXES
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Round 1's own hardening had three further holes, all found live against
+this exact file, plus two smaller defects. Fixed in this order (matching
+the order the defeats were found in, most dangerous first):
+
+  1. "; PATTERN" SILENCED A WHOLE BLOCK, NOT JUST ITS OWN ENTRY. `check()`
+     used to test `"PATTERN" in block_comment` -- one substring search over
+     every comment in the block -- and `continue` past the ENTIRE block if
+     it matched anywhere. In a block that mixes a PATTERN-marked entry with
+     an ordinary entry carrying its own, genuinely wrong citation (exactly
+     [season]'s own trailing-comment style: several entries back-to-back
+     with no blank line between them), the wrong citation was never even
+     looked at. Fixed by scoping PATTERN the same way citation pools are
+     already scoped: a PASS over the block first collects which entries a
+     PATTERN-bearing comment actually covers (the one preceding entry for a
+     trailing comment, every entry in the block for a leading one -- the
+     identical leading/trailing rule `check()` already uses for citation
+     pooling), and only THOSE entries are excluded from checking. See
+     `test_pattern_does_not_silence_a_different_entry_in_the_same_block`.
+  2. EXPLICIT RANGES HAD NO UPPER BOUND. Round 1 replaced the old blanket
+     +-2-line tolerance with an explicit per-citation range
+     ("LT.txt:8609-8610") specifically so a wrap allowance would be
+     visible in the data instead of invisible in the checker -- but set no
+     cap on how WIDE that range could be. "LT.txt:8600-8650" passed if the
+     claimed text appeared anywhere across fifty lines: the same
+     "tolerance forgives a wrong line" defect the +-2 removal was meant to
+     close, reintroduced at 25x the radius, now with the data's own
+     apparent blessing. Fixed with `MAX_RANGE_WIDTH` (see below): a range
+     wider than a genuine heading wrap (1-2 extra physical lines) is
+     rejected as MALFORMED, naming the entry and the width, rather than
+     silently accepted. See `test_range_wider_than_cap_is_malformed`.
+  3. THE "TOO THIN TO VERIFY" GATE COUNTED WORDS, NOT RARITY. Round 1
+     required a pool item to have >=2 distinctive words before it could
+     even be checked, on the theory that a one-word match proves nothing.
+     Measured against the real data: this flagged 11 CORRECT citations
+     CANNOT VERIFY -- every one a short Latin hagionym whose Missal
+     heading genuinely has only one non-stopword ("S. Antonii Abb.": only
+     "antonii" survives the stopword filter) -- while a match on nothing
+     but "classis" (507 occurrences across LT.txt) passed the >=2 bar
+     freely whenever it shared a citation with three siblings ("I classis
+     / II classis / III classis / IV classis"). Word COUNT was never the
+     right proxy; word RARITY is. Replaced with `build_frequency_table` +
+     `item_evidence`: a token seen n times in the whole corpus contributes
+     1/n of evidence, an item's evidence is its single RAREST matched
+     token (not a sum -- see `item_evidence`'s own docstring for why
+     summing would reopen this exact class of bug), and `EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD`
+     is the bar a match must clear to count as real proof rather than
+     coincidence. See `test_rare_single_word_match_passes` and
+     `test_common_word_only_match_is_cannot_verify`.
+  4. A COMMA TYPO SILENTLY BECAME A DIFFERENT CITATION. "LT.txt:12,459" (a
+     stray thousands-separator comma for the single number "12459") used
+     to parse as TWO independent bare citations, "12" and "459" -- either
+     of which might coincidentally match somewhere nearby while the
+     intended line was never checked at all. `parse_citation_spec` now
+     recognises the shape (a 1-2 digit token immediately followed by an
+     exactly-3-digit token -- the only way a thousands-grouped LT.txt line
+     number, which never exceeds 5 digits, can be split by one comma) and
+     rejects the whole spec as MALFORMED rather than silently reinterpreting
+     it. See `test_thousands_separator_typo_is_malformed`.
+  5. THE SELF-TEST SUITE OVERSTATED ITS OWN COVERAGE. A review ran round
+     1's seven fixture cases against the PRE-round-1 script: only two
+     (`test_off_by_one_line_fails`, `test_self_poisoning_quote_does_not_pass`)
+     actually failed on it -- the rest passed on both sides of round 1's
+     fix and regression-tested nothing despite their names (a third,
+     `test_wrap_range_required_not_just_first_line`, was added after the
+     "seven" and also turns out to be a genuine regression test, confirmed
+     the same way). Every test in this suite is now labelled REGRESSION
+     (shown, not just claimed, to fail against a named prior version) or
+     CHARACTERISATION (pins current behaviour; does not fail on the prior
+     version, usually because it exercises a data shape or API surface
+     that prior version did not have at all) -- see
+     `test_check_citations.py`'s own module docstring for the full,
+     per-test account and how each label was actually verified.
+
+MALFORMED, PRECISELY (round 2's third finding class, alongside WRONG and
+CANNOT VERIFY): a citation whose SYNTAX cannot be trusted even before its
+content is checked -- a range wider than `MAX_RANGE_WIDTH`, a backwards
+range, or the thousands-separator-typo shape above. Reported, counted, and
+fails the run exactly like a WRONG citation: rejecting the syntax rather
+than guessing at the author's intent is the whole point (see fix 2 and
+fix 4 above) -- "the author either finds the real line or marks it PATTERN
+honestly" is not achieved by the checker silently picking a reading.
+
+WHAT THIS CHECKS, PRECISELY (a heuristic, not a proof)
+-------------------------------------------------------
+lang/la.ini's own comments cite a Missal heading in one of two shapes:
+
+  1. A LEADING comment block, then a group of entries it covers, e.g.
+     "; Ash Wednesday and the three days after it -- LT.txt:8686-8689."
+     followed by four `key = value` lines. The pool for every citation
+     found in such a comment is EVERY entry in the group (there is no
+     positional correspondence encoded in the data between a particular
+     cited line and a particular entry in the list).
+  2. A TRAILING comment immediately under the ONE entry it explains, e.g.
+     "advent = Tempus Adventus" then "; LT.txt:8609." on the next line,
+     with no blank line -- [season]'s own style. The pool is that one entry
+     alone.
+
+A "PATTERN" marker follows the identical leading/trailing rule (see round
+2 fix 1 above): it excludes only the entry (or entries) it is itself
+attached to from citation-checking, never the rest of the block.
+
+A citation is either a bare line number ("LT.txt:8609") or an explicit
+range ("LT.txt:8609-8610", capped at `MAX_RANGE_WIDTH` lines) for a heading
+that genuinely wraps across physical lines in the source; a comma-separated
+list ("LT.txt:8618,8620,8622") is several independent citations, each
+checked on its own -- unless the list itself looks like a thousands-typo
+for one number (round 2 fix 4), in which case the whole spec is MALFORMED.
+For a bare number the window is that one line; for a range it is the union
+of every line in the range (inclusive). There is no other tolerance.
+
+For each citation, the POOL is the set of candidate Latin phrases it could
+be defending: the entry (trailing shape) or every entry in the group
+(leading shape) -- nothing pulled from quoted prose elsewhere in the
+comment (see the self-poisoning account above). Each pool item keeps its
+OWN distinctive-word set (>=4 letters, not on the small stopword list
+below, j/i and ae/oe/diacritics normalised) -- items are never flattened
+into one shared bag, for the same reason quotes were removed: a citation
+bundling two claims onto one line number must not pass on the strength of
+an unrelated pool item's words.
+
+A pool item is a candidate MATCH only if the cited window's text contains
+ALL of its distinctive words -- otherwise it is not a match at all: it
+never contributed to a PASS and is not what the citation is checked at
+all. Among pool items that ARE contained in the window, the citation
+PASSES if at least one clears `EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD` (see round 2 fix 3
+above and `item_evidence`'s own docstring) -- i.e. contains a word rare
+enough, across the whole LT.txt corpus, to be real evidence rather than
+coincidence. A citation whose only contained items are all common-word-only
+is CANNOT VERIFY, not a silent PASS: found, but not proven. A citation with
+NO contained item at all -- the claimed words are simply not at the cited
+line(s) -- is WRONG.
+
+This is deliberately a LOOSE, word-overlap check within the (now exact and
+bounded) window, not a byte-exact phrase match: la.ini spells abbreviations
+out in full (Sanctissimi, not Ss.mi) and normalises j->i, and requiring a
+byte-exact substring would either force every citation's prose to repeat
+the raw OCR text verbatim (defeating the point of writing readable
+comments) or produce false failures having nothing to do with a wrong line
+number. What it proves is narrower than a byte-exact match, and is
+disclosed as such: PASS means "the claimed name's distinctive words are
+present, in full, at the exact line(s) cited, and at least one of them is
+rare enough in the corpus to be real evidence" -- not that the citation is
+the best possible line, only that it is not obviously wrong and is not
+resting on a coincidence-prone common word.
+"""
+import argparse
+import re
+import sys
+import unicodedata
+from pathlib import Path
+
+ROOT = Path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent
+DEFAULT_LA_INI = ROOT / "lang" / "la.ini"
+DEFAULT_LT_TXT = ROOT / "docs" / "research" / "LT.txt"
+
+STOPWORDS = {
+    "in", "de", "et", "ad", "post", "ante", "cum", "per", "seu", "infra",
+    "vel", "si", "haec", "hoc", "hic", "qui", "quae", "quod", "quia",
+    "tempus", "dominica", "dominicam", "dominicae", "feria", "feriae",
+    "sabbato", "sabbatum", "die", "diebus", "eodem", "anno", "eius",
+    "sancti", "sancta", "sanctae", "sancto", "sanctorum", "sanctus",
+    "domini", "dominus", "octava", "octavam", "octavas",
+    "missae", "missa", "proprium", "gregorianus", "cantus", "pdf",
+    "forma", "longior", "brevior", "vide", "etiam", "dom", "prosper",
+    "sacro", "actio", "electronica", "formam", "novissimae", "variationes",
+    "copyright", "archivum", "liturgicum", "missale", "romanum", "index",
+    "www", "http", "https", "htm", "html", "com", "romanum", "text",
+}
+
+# A citation's explicit range is capped at this many lines (n .. n+2). A
+# genuine heading wrap in the source is one or two extra physical lines;
+# anything wider is not a wrap, it is a search over a neighbourhood wide
+# enough to coincidentally contain almost any short phrase -- exactly the
+# blanket +-2 tolerance round 1 removed, reintroduced at a much larger
+# radius by an unbounded range. See round 2 fix 2 in the module docstring.
+MAX_RANGE_WIDTH = 3
+
+# The evidence bar a pool item's RAREST matched word must clear to count
+# as real proof (see `item_evidence` below). 1/200: a word occurring up to
+# ~200 times across the whole ~118,000-token LT.txt corpus can still be
+# the deciding, sole distinctive word of a short Missal calendar-table
+# entry (measured: "omnium", the only survivor in "Omnium Sanctorum",
+# occurs 139 times across the whole document, mostly in unrelated legal
+# prose -- "of all" is common Latin furniture -- yet is genuinely the
+# correct, sole citable word for that one heading). "classis" (507
+# occurrences), the round 1 false-pass this rule specifically targets,
+# sits comfortably over 2.5x past this bar and stays CANNOT VERIFY.
+# Round-2's own measurement of every affected real citation in
+# lang/la.ini is in the branch report.
+EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD = 1.0 / 200
+
+
+def normalize_word(w: str) -> str:
+    w = w.lower()
+    w = unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", w)
+    w = "".join(c for c in w if not unicodedata.combining(c))
+    w = w.replace("æ", "ae").replace("œ", "oe")
+    w = re.sub(r"[^a-z]", "", w)
+    w = w.replace("j", "i")
+    return w
+
+
+def distinctive_words(text: str) -> set:
+    out = set()
+    for tok in re.split(r"\s+", text):
+        w = normalize_word(tok)
+        if len(w) >= 4 and w not in STOPWORDS:
+            out.add(w)
+    return out
+
+
+def build_frequency_table(lt_lines: list) -> dict:
+    """Count how many times each normalised word occurs anywhere in the
+    whole LT.txt corpus -- built ONCE per run (not per citation) and
+    consulted by `word_evidence`/`item_evidence` below. This is what lets
+    the checker tell a token that could only ever mean one heading (occurs
+    once in 26,000+ lines) apart from common liturgical furniture (occurs
+    hundreds of times) -- see round 2 fix 3 in the module docstring."""
+    freq = {}
+    for line in lt_lines:
+        for tok in re.split(r"\s+", line):
+            w = normalize_word(tok)
+            if w:
+                freq[w] = freq.get(w, 0) + 1
+    return freq
+
+
+def word_evidence(word: str, freq: dict) -> float:
+    """A token seen n times contributes 1/n: a hapax (n=1) contributes 1.0
+    -- about as conclusive as a word-overlap check can be -- and a word
+    occurring hundreds of times contributes next to nothing. A plain
+    reciprocal is chosen over a logarithmic/IDF scale deliberately:
+    measured against this corpus, log-scaling compresses "occurs once" and
+    "occurs 500 times" into a difference of a few units, too close to
+    cleanly separate "essentially conclusive" from "unverified" with a
+    single threshold; a reciprocal keeps them many orders of magnitude
+    apart, which is the actual claim this rule makes."""
+    n = freq.get(word, 0)
+    return 1.0 / n if n > 0 else 0.0
+
+
+def item_evidence(words: set, freq: dict) -> float:
+    """A pool item's rarity evidence is the SINGLE RAREST word it matched
+    on -- not a sum over all its words. Summing would let several
+    merely-uncommon words add up to "enough" evidence between them, which
+    is exactly the shape round 2 fix 3 exists to close (a match consisting
+    only of common tokens must stay CANNOT VERIFY "regardless of how many
+    words sit beside it") and exactly the self-poisoning failure mode from
+    round 1 (quoted corrective prose tends to share several ordinary words
+    with its neighbour, never one rare one). One genuinely rare word is
+    real evidence; an accumulation of merely-uncommon words is not the
+    same thing and must not be treated as if it were."""
+    if not words:
+        return 0.0
+    return max(word_evidence(w, freq) for w in words)
+
+
+class CitationRef:
+    """One citation token: 'label' is what the data actually wrote
+    ("8609" or "8609-8610"); 'lines' is the fully-expanded, sorted list of
+    line numbers the label names -- a single-element list for a bare
+    number, the whole inclusive range for an explicit wrap."""
+
+    __slots__ = ("label", "lines")
+
+    def __init__(self, label, lines):
+        self.label = label
+        self.lines = lines
+
+
+def _looks_like_thousands_typo(tokens) -> bool:
+    """'12,459' splits into ('12', '459') -- the classic shape of a human
+    thousands-separator typo for a single 4-5 digit LT.txt line number:
+    grouped from the right in chunks of 3, a 4-digit number groups as
+    'N,NNN' and a 5-digit number as 'NN,NNN' (LT.txt never reaches 6
+    digits, so a 3-digit leading group never arises from real grouping).
+    Checked against every real comma-list citation in lang/la.ini as of
+    round 2: none has a 1-2 digit token immediately followed by an
+    exactly-3-digit token, so this shape is unambiguous enough in practice
+    to reject outright as malformed rather than silently parsing as two
+    unrelated short citations (round 2 fix 4)."""
+    for a, b in zip(tokens, tokens[1:]):
+        if re.fullmatch(r"\d{1,2}", a) and re.fullmatch(r"\d{3}", b):
+            return True
+    return False
+
+
+def parse_citation_spec(spec: str):
+    """'8618,8620,8622' -> three exact-line CitationRefs; '8609-8610' -> one
+    CitationRef spanning both lines (an explicit wrapped heading, capped at
+    MAX_RANGE_WIDTH lines). Returns (refs, malformed): `refs` is the list of
+    successfully-parsed CitationRef objects; `malformed` is a list of
+    {"token", "reason"} dicts for anything that did NOT parse into a
+    trustworthy citation -- a backwards range, a range wider than the cap,
+    the thousands-typo shape above, or an unparseable token. Round 1
+    silently DROPPED all of these (no crash, but no report either); round 2
+    surfaces every one instead, because a malformed citation naming a real
+    entry deserves a human's attention exactly as much as a wrong one does
+    (see round 2 fixes 2 and 4 in the module docstring)."""
+    raw_tokens = [t.strip() for t in spec.split(",")]
+    if _looks_like_thousands_typo(raw_tokens):
+        return [], [
+            {
+                "token": spec,
+                "reason": (
+                    "looks like a thousands-separator typo for one number "
+                    "(a 1-2 digit token immediately followed by a 3-digit "
+                    "one) rather than a genuine list of citations -- "
+                    "remove the comma, or split into real citations"
+                ),
+            }
+        ]
+    refs = []
+    malformed = []
+    for tok in raw_tokens:
+        if not tok:
+            continue
+        m = re.fullmatch(r"(\d{2,6})-(\d{2,6})", tok)
+        if m:
+            a, b = int(m.group(1)), int(m.group(2))
+            width = b - a + 1
+            if a > b:
+                malformed.append({"token": tok, "reason": f"backwards range (LT.txt:{tok})"})
+            elif width > MAX_RANGE_WIDTH:
+                malformed.append(
+                    {
+                        "token": tok,
+                        "reason": (
+                            f"range is {width} lines wide (max {MAX_RANGE_WIDTH}) -- "
+                            "not a genuine heading wrap; find the real line or mark PATTERN honestly"
+                        ),
+                    }
+                )
+            else:
+                refs.append(CitationRef(tok, list(range(a, b + 1))))
+            continue
+        m = re.fullmatch(r"(\d{2,6})", tok)
+        if m:
+            refs.append(CitationRef(tok, [int(m.group(1))]))
+            continue
+        malformed.append({"token": tok, "reason": "unparseable citation token"})
+    return refs, malformed
+
+
+CITATION_RE = re.compile(r"LT\.txt:\s*((?:\d{2,6}(?:-\d{2,6})?)(?:\s*,\s*\d{2,6}(?:-\d{2,6})?)*)")
+
+
+def parse_blocks(la_ini_text: str):
+    """Split la.ini into blocks on blank lines and [section] headers. Each
+    block is a list of (kind, content) where kind is 'comment' or 'entry',
+    content is the stripped comment text or (key, value)."""
+    blocks = []
+    cur = []
+    for raw in la_ini_text.split("\n"):
+        line = raw.rstrip("\n")
+        stripped = line.strip()
+        if stripped == "" or stripped.startswith("["):
+            if cur:
+                blocks.append(cur)
+            cur = []
+            continue
+        if stripped.startswith(";"):
+            cur.append(("comment", stripped[1:].strip()))
+        elif "=" in stripped:
+            k, _, v = stripped.partition("=")
+            cur.append(("entry", (k.strip(), v.strip())))
+        # anything else (shouldn't occur) is ignored
+    if cur:
+        blocks.append(cur)
+    return blocks
+
+
+def window_text_for(lt_lines, lines):
+    lo, hi = lines[0], lines[-1]
+    lo_c, hi_c = max(1, lo), min(len(lt_lines), hi)
+    if lo_c > hi_c:
+        return ""
+    return " ".join(lt_lines[lo_c - 1 : hi_c])
+
+
+def _pool_entries_for(entries_before, entries):
+    """The leading/trailing pooling rule, shared identically by citation
+    checking AND PATTERN scoping (round 2 fix 1): a TRAILING comment (one
+    or more entries already seen in this block) pools against only the
+    most recent entry; a LEADING comment (no entry seen yet) pools against
+    every entry in the block. The same rule must decide both questions --
+    a PATTERN marker and a citation attached to the same comment always
+    cover the same entries, by construction."""
+    return [entries_before[-1]] if entries_before else entries
+
+
+def _pattern_marked_entries(block, entries):
+    """Which entries in this block are excluded from citation-checking by
+    their OWN "PATTERN" marker -- never by a PATTERN marker attached to a
+    DIFFERENT entry in the same block. Returns a set of `id()` of the
+    entry (key, value) tuples (safe: each entry tuple is a single object,
+    shared by reference between `block` and `entries`, never copied).
+
+    This is a first, standalone pass over the block, completed before any
+    citation is evaluated, so a citation's own PATTERN status never
+    depends on where in the block it happens to sit relative to its
+    entry's PATTERN comment."""
+    marked = set()
+    entries_before = []
+    for k, c in block:
+        if k == "comment":
+            if "PATTERN" in c:
+                for e in _pool_entries_for(entries_before, entries):
+                    marked.add(id(e))
+        else:
+            entries_before.append(c)
+    return marked
+
+
+def check(la_ini_text: str, lt_lines: list):
+    """Returns a dict: checked (int), passed (int), findings (list --
+    wrong citations), unverifiable (list -- no matched item clears the
+    evidence bar), malformed (list -- citation syntax itself could not be
+    trusted). findings, unverifiable and malformed are all things a human
+    must look at; only 'passed' citations required no human attention."""
+    checked = 0
+    passed = 0
+    findings = []
+    unverifiable = []
+    malformed = []
+    freq = build_frequency_table(lt_lines)
+
+    for block in parse_blocks(la_ini_text):
+        entries = [c for k, c in block if k == "entry"]
+        if not entries:
+            continue
+
+        pattern_entries = _pattern_marked_entries(block, entries)
+
+        entries_before = []
+        for k, c in block:
+            if k == "comment":
+                for m in CITATION_RE.finditer(c):
+                    pool_entries = _pool_entries_for(entries_before, entries)
+                    if all(id(e) in pattern_entries for e in pool_entries):
+                        # Every entry this citation could be defending is
+                        # itself PATTERN-marked: this "LT.txt:N" is not a
+                        # provenance claim for any of them (e.g. citing the
+                        # GRAMMAR another day's heading attests), so
+                        # checking it would produce a meaningless failure.
+                        continue
+                    entry_desc = ", ".join(f"{k2}={v2}" for k2, v2 in pool_entries)
+                    pool_items = [distinctive_words(v2) for _, v2 in pool_entries]
+                    nonempty_items = [p for p in pool_items if p]
+                    pool_words = sorted(set().union(*pool_items)) if pool_items else []
+
+                    refs, bad_tokens = parse_citation_spec(m.group(1))
+                    for bad in bad_tokens:
+                        checked += 1
+                        malformed.append(
+                            {
+                                "label": bad["token"],
+                                "entries": entry_desc,
+                                "reason": bad["reason"],
+                            }
+                        )
+                    for ref in refs:
+                        checked += 1
+                        window_text = window_text_for(lt_lines, ref.lines)
+                        window_words = distinctive_words(window_text)
+
+                        if not nonempty_items:
+                            # Every pool item is fully stopwords -- there is
+                            # nothing to check either way. Absence of
+                            # evidence is not evidence of correctness.
+                            unverifiable.append(
+                                {
+                                    "label": ref.label,
+                                    "entries": entry_desc,
+                                    "reason": "no distinctive words in the entry text to check at all",
+                                    "pool_words": pool_words,
+                                }
+                            )
+                            continue
+
+                        contained_items = [p for p in nonempty_items if p <= window_words]
+                        strong_items = [
+                            p for p in contained_items if item_evidence(p, freq) >= EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD
+                        ]
+                        if strong_items:
+                            passed += 1
+                        elif contained_items:
+                            best = max(item_evidence(p, freq) for p in contained_items)
+                            unverifiable.append(
+                                {
+                                    "label": ref.label,
+                                    "entries": entry_desc,
+                                    "reason": (
+                                        f"matched, but every matched word is too common to trust "
+                                        f"(best evidence {best:.4f}, need >= {EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD:.4f})"
+                                    ),
+                                    "pool_words": pool_words,
+                                }
+                            )
+                        else:
+                            n = ref.lines[0]
+                            findings.append(
+                                {
+                                    "label": ref.label,
+                                    "entries": entry_desc,
+                                    "actual": (
+                                        lt_lines[n - 1].strip()
+                                        if 1 <= n <= len(lt_lines)
+                                        else "(out of range)"
+                                    ),
+                                    "window": window_text.strip()[:160],
+                                }
+                            )
+            else:
+                entries_before.append(c)
+    return {
+        "checked": checked,
+        "passed": passed,
+        "findings": findings,
+        "unverifiable": unverifiable,
+        "malformed": malformed,
+    }
+
+
+def build_arg_parser():
+    p = argparse.ArgumentParser(description=__doc__.splitlines()[0])
+    p.add_argument(
+        "--file",
+        dest="la_ini",
+        type=Path,
+        default=DEFAULT_LA_INI,
+        help=f"the la.ini-shaped file to check (default: {DEFAULT_LA_INI})",
+    )
+    p.add_argument(
+        "--lt-file",
+        dest="lt_txt",
+        type=Path,
+        default=DEFAULT_LT_TXT,
+        help=f"the LT.txt transcription to check against (default: {DEFAULT_LT_TXT})",
+    )
+    return p
+
+
+def main(argv=None):
+    args = build_arg_parser().parse_args(argv)
+    if not args.lt_txt.exists():
+        print(
+            f"SKIPPED: {args.lt_txt} is absent (docs/ is gitignored -- "
+            "present locally only). Citations are NOT verified this run."
+        )
+        return 0
+    la_ini_text = args.la_ini.read_text(encoding="utf-8")
+    lt_lines = args.lt_txt.read_text(encoding="utf-8", errors="replace").split("\n")
+    result = check(la_ini_text, lt_lines)
+    checked = result["checked"]
+    findings = result["findings"]
+    unverifiable = result["unverifiable"]
+    malformed = result["malformed"]
+
+    if not findings and not unverifiable and not malformed:
+        print(f"check-citations: {checked} LT.txt citations checked, 0 look wrong.")
+        return 0
+
+    print(
+        f"check-citations: {len(findings)} of {checked} citations look wrong, "
+        f"{len(malformed)} MALFORMED, {len(unverifiable)} CANNOT VERIFY (see below):\n"
+    )
+    if findings:
+        print("WRONG:\n")
+        for f in findings:
+            print(f"  LT.txt:{f['label']} cited for [{f['entries']}]")
+            print(f"    actual: {f['actual']!r}")
+            print(f"    window: {f['window']!r}\n")
+    if malformed:
+        print("MALFORMED (citation syntax itself is untrustworthy):\n")
+        for m in malformed:
+            print(f"  LT.txt:{m['label']} cited for [{m['entries']}]")
+            print(f"    {m['reason']}\n")
+    if unverifiable:
+        print("CANNOT VERIFY (a human must adjudicate these by hand):\n")
+        for u in unverifiable:
+            words = ", ".join(u["pool_words"]) if u["pool_words"] else "(none)"
+            print(f"  LT.txt:{u['label']} cited for [{u['entries']}]")
+            print(f"    {u['reason']}; pool words: {words}\n")
+    return 2
+
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    sys.exit(main())