Linguistic Gap Analysis
Linguistic Gap Analysis — Galatians
Purpose and Method
This analysis identifies where the Bodo language has (a) genuine vocabulary gaps requiring newly built descriptive compounds, and (b) “crowded” semantic neighborhoods where existing native or Sanskrit/Assamese-loan vocabulary already carries competing associations from Bathouism or Brahma Dharma that must be actively fenced off in teaching notes. It extends the Romans baseline (translation_memory.json, bible_term_registry.json) — never contradicting fixed Romans renderings — and incorporates every term surfaced in 08_core_glossary.md and the updated bible_term_registry.json for Galatians. Coverage spans all six chapters of Galatians; no chapter is treated as a scope boundary. The core passage (2:15-21) is this curriculum’s theological anchor and receives the deepest treatment, consistent with its density of Critical-risk terms, but every chapter contributes load-bearing gap material, confirmed below.
Full-book chapter coverage confirmation:
- Galatians 1 — apostleship’s direct-commission emphasis, gospel-distortion vocabulary, revelation vs. oracular trance-disclosure, pre-birth “set apart,” anathema, zeal, ancestral tradition. Reviewed, load-bearing.
- Galatians 2 (includes core passage 2:15-21) — justification, works of the law, crucified with Christ, sinner/transgressor, flesh (idiomatic sense), hypocrisy, false brothers, pillars, nullify, “in vain,” self-giving of Christ, love. Reviewed, load-bearing; highest density of Critical terms.
- Galatians 3 — bewitched, faith/righteousness/imputed righteousness reaffirmed, curse of the law, redeemed, promise, seed of Abraham, mediator, guardian/tutor, baptized, slave/free, heir, elemental spirits (first occurrence). Reviewed, load-bearing.
- Galatians 4 — adoption, Abba, elemental spirits (second occurrence), Hagar/Sarah allegory, two covenants, Jerusalem above, heir. Reviewed, load-bearing.
- Galatians 5 — freedom, slavery/yoke, works of the flesh, fruit of the Spirit, faith working through love, flesh/Spirit contrast at its densest, biting/devouring idiom, circumcision doctrine continuation. Reviewed, load-bearing.
- Galatians 6 — bearing burdens, restoring gently, sow/reap, new creation, boasting, marks of Jesus, household of faith. Reviewed, load-bearing.
Part 1 — Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| # | Curriculum Doctrine | Available Destination-Language Terms | Weaknesses | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Justification by Faith | धार्मिक होनाय राव (justification, REUSE Critical); बिश्वास (faith, REUSE High); दानै लाबोनाय धार्मिकता (imputed righteousness, REUSE Critical) | No single Bodo verb carries the forensic “declared righteous” sense; the compound already fixed in Romans works but requires the identical Genesis 15:6 quotation (3:6) to match Romans 4 verbatim, or learners moving between curricula will suspect two different doctrines. | Reuse Romans compounds without modification. Require side-by-side display of Romans 4 and Galatians 3:6 renderings in teaching material to reinforce cross-curriculum consistency. |
| 2 | The True Gospel versus False Gospels | मंगल खबर (gospel, REUSE High); मंगल खबरखौ बांद्राय खालामनाय (distort, NEW High); अभिशाप जायो (anathema, NEW High); मंगल खबरनि सत्य (truth of the gospel, NEW Medium) | Bodo has no native category for “one authoritative message that can be corrupted into its opposite” distinct from “an alternative teaching among several” — a real risk given the region’s multiple living, actively self-reforming religious movements (Brahma Dharma explicitly presents itself as a corrective “return to purity”). | Explicitly teach μεταστρέψαι as counterfeiting a fixed message, not reforming an inherited one; never let distort-vocabulary echo Brahma Dharma’s own reform self-description. |
| 3 | Paul’s Apostleship | गोदान जायगारि (apostle, REUSE Medium); ईश्वरनि खुलাइनাय (revelation, NEW High); फोजोब खালামবাय (set apart, NEW High) | गोदान जायगारि is a general “sent-with-commission” compound with limited attested use; Galatians 1:1’s forceful “not from man” claim needs stronger emphatic framing than Romans required. | Retain the Romans compound but add emphatic modifying clauses in surrounding text (“directly from Christ, not through any human agency”) rather than altering the fixed noun itself. |
| 4 | Law and Grace | बिथान (law, elevated to High for this curriculum); मोफादांनाय दान (grace, REUSE Critical); बिथाननि गुनथि (works of the law, NEW Critical) | This is Galatians’ central antithesis, structurally more load-bearing than in Romans; बिथान and दान both sit in crowded neighborhoods (see Part 2). | Escalate risk tier for बिथान specifically within this curriculum (per glossary); mandatory theologian review anywhere works-of-the-law and grace appear in the same segment. |
| 5 | Crucified with Christ | मसीहजों समान खुरुसाव गोथाखानाय (NEW Critical); खुरुस (cross, transliterated loan, High) | No existing Bodo phrase for a believer’s identity-uniting co-crucifixion; this is a genuine conceptual gap, not a wrong-word problem — closer in kind to the baseline’s “salvation” gap than to a simple mistranslation risk. | Build and hold the descriptive compound exactly as recorded; mandatory theologian review at every occurrence (2:19-20; 5:24; 6:14); explicit negative fencing against Kherai-trance and rebirth-cycle imagery in every lesson introducing the term. |
| 6 | The Abrahamic Covenant and Promise | अब्राहाम (transliterated proper name, Medium); गोसाथारि (covenant, REUSE High); थारायनाय (promise, NEW Medium); अब्राहामनि बेंसे (seed of Abraham, NEW High) | No native founding-patriarch-with-covenant-promise narrative exists in either Bathou oral tradition or Brahma Dharma reform literature; promise and law must be taught as sequentially and logically distinct, a distinction with no ready cultural shortcut. | Provide substantial Old Testament narrative scaffolding (Genesis 12/15/17) before introducing the doctrine; keep थारायनाय terminologically separate from बिथान in every lesson. |
| 7 | The Law’s Purpose | बिथाननि रखिया (guardian/tutor, NEW High); अभिशाप (curse, NEW High) | The παιδαγωγός household-role concept (a custodial slave overseeing a freeborn child) is a specific, temporary social-legal office with no exact Bodo social parallel; risk of the compound being heard as either “law was worthless” or “law is a permanent authority.” | Teach the temporary, now-superseded, yet originally God-given nature of the law explicitly; do not let रखिया drift toward either extreme. |
| 8 | Adoption and Sonship | गोसोआव फैनाय (adoption, REUSE High); अब्बा/आफा (REUSE Critical/High); वारिस (heir, NEW High); ईश्वरनि गोरा (Son of God, REUSE Critical) | Formal legal adoption with full inheritance rights is not a settled Bodo kinship category; clan (afad) inheritance runs strictly through birth descent, and chapter 4’s slave/heir contrast directly challenges that custom more sharply than Romans 8 did. | Explicitly teach that faith-adoption confers the SAME inheritance rights as birth-sonship — a claim Bodo custom does not assume — rather than let the term pass as self-evident. |
| 9 | Freedom in Christ | स्वाधीनता (freedom, NEW High); दासत्व (slavery/yoke, NEW Medium); गुलाम (slave, NEW Medium-High) | स्वाधीनता is a live secular-political term in contemporary Bodoland autonomy discourse; risk of the doctrine being reheard as ethnic-political liberation rather than freedom from law’s condemning power and sin’s dominion. | Explicit disambiguating note required at first occurrence (5:1) distinguishing this freedom from political autonomy; never substitute मुक्ति/मोक्ष (forbidden, shared root with Brahma Dharma’s rebirth-liberation category). |
| 10 | Circumcision and the New Creation | खतना (circumcision, NEW High); नतुन सृष्टि (new creation, NEW Critical) | खतना has no native Bodo ritual analogue and needs OT covenant-sign background; सृष्टि carries strong pre-existing Hindu-influenced cyclical creation/dissolution cosmology absorbed into Brahma Dharma’s cosmological teaching. | Teach खतना strictly as the historical circumcision controversy, not generic “legalism”; teach नतुन सृष्टि as a one-time, non-cyclical, definitive transformation, explicitly paralleling the baseline’s non-cyclical framing of resurrection. Mandatory theologian review for सृष्टि. |
| 11 | Flesh versus Spirit | गाव (flesh, NEW High — triple sense); पबित्र आत्था (Holy Spirit, REUSE Critical) | A single Bodo lexeme (गाव) must carry three distinct senses across the letter (idiomatic “no one,” neutral “bodily life,” ethical “sinful nature”), a homograph-management burden concentrated most heavily in chapter 5. | Mandatory translator note specifying the active sense at every occurrence; never let the ethical sense (5:13-24) bleed into the neutral sense (2:20) or vice versa. |
| 12 | Fruit of the Spirit | पबित्र आत्मानि फल (NEW Medium); बिश्वास (homonym risk: “faithfulness” here, not saving faith) | The virtue-list category must be kept distinct from आत्मानि दान (Spirit-given ministry gifts, already fixed for a different sense in the Romans baseline); बिश्वास’s second sense inside this specific list is a genuine homonym collision. | Flag बिश्वास as “faithfulness” (character) at 5:22 with an explicit translator note every time; keep फल terminologically separate from दान throughout. |
| 13 | Faith Working through Love | प्रेमजों बिश्वास काम खालामो (NEW High) | Risk that love is misheard as an additional work that justifies, undermining the doctrine of justification by faith alone taught two chapters earlier via the identical core passage. | Cross-reference explicitly with 2:15-21 in every lesson; state clearly that love is faith’s fruit/expression, never its supplementary ground. |
| 14 | Bearing One Another’s Burdens | एकबेनि बजन बिफांदो लांबो (NEW Low-Medium) | Risk of resonance with accumulated-merit / merit-transfer thinking (पुण्य-adjacent) if burden-bearing is heard as ritually transferable credit rather than voluntary loving service. | Explicit note that this is relational mutual care, not a merit-transfer mechanism; keep terminologically distinct from मोफादांनाय दान (grace) and दानै लाबोनाय धार्मिकता (imputed righteousness). |
Part 2 — Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
2.1 Genuine Vocabulary Gaps (no native equivalent; must be taught from the ground up)
These are conceptual absences, not existing-wrong-word problems — the same class of risk the baseline already documented for “salvation” and “incarnation” in Romans.
| Term | Nature of the Gap | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Crucified with Christ (मसीहजों समान खुरुसाव गोथाखानाय) | No Bodo category for a believer’s judicial/spiritual co-crucifixion with a historical execution victim. | Built descriptive compound; teach as completed, once-for-all, non-cyclical identity-change. |
| Works of the law (बिथाननि गुनथि) | No existing single term names “Torah-boundary-marker observance treated as a righteousness-earning system” as distinct from law-keeping generally. | Compound built on established बिथान root + गुनथि; explicit teaching that this names a specific historical controversy, not law-keeping in general. |
| Elemental spirits / basic principles of the world (दुनिया नि गिबि नियम) | Paul’s category spans both pre-Christian pagan religious bondage and reversion to law — an abstraction with no native lexical slot. | Deliberately generic descriptive phrase; CRITICAL forbidden-substitution: must never use ha/dwi/bar/or/okhrang (the five Bathou elements). |
| New creation (नतुन सृष्टि) | The “definitive, one-time, non-cyclical transformation” sense has to override सृष्टि’s default cyclical-cosmology resonance. | Explicit theologian-reviewed teaching note at every occurrence; parallel explicitly to resurrection’s non-cyclical framing. |
| Guardian/tutor (बिथाननि रखिया) | The παιδαγωγός household office (custodial slave over a freeborn child, pending adulthood) has no Bodo social parallel. | Descriptive compound; teach the specific historical household role before applying it typologically to the law. |
| Mediator (मध्यस्थ) | Moses’ one-time, historical covenant-mediating function must not default to the community’s familiar doudini/ओझा ongoing ritual-mediumship role. | Explicit teaching that this is a single historical event, not a recurring office. |
| Redeemed [at a price] (दाम होनाय फोरायनाय) | Generic फोरायनाय (salvation) does not, by itself, carry the “purchased at a specific cost” nuance Galatians 3:13/4:5 requires. | Compound retains “paid a price” explicitly; escalate alongside atonement material. |
| Seed of Abraham, singular-to-Christ argument (अब्राहामनि बेंसे) | Bodo clan (afad) lineage thinking runs through strict birth descent; Paul’s singular-then-corporate argument (3:16, 3:29) has no shortcut through existing kinship logic. | Teach explicitly as a two-step argument (singular fulfillment in Christ, then corporate inclusion of all who believe), not assumed. |
| Adoption/Heir (गोसोआव फैनाय / वारिस) | Formal adoption with full inheritance parity is not a settled Bodo legal-kinship category. | Explicit teaching that adoptive sonship carries identical inheritance rights to birth-sonship — a claim, not an assumption. |
| Bewitched (गोरोबथाव खालामबाय, for ἐβασκάνατε) | Paul’s idiom is rhetorical astonishment, but Bodo village religious life includes a real, currently practiced fear of literal evil-eye affliction addressed by an ओझा. | Mandatory theologian + native-speaker review; translator note must state explicitly this is rhetorical incredulity, not a claim of literal sorcery. |
2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (existing vocabulary needs active fencing)
These terms already exist in ordinary or religious Bodo usage with competing associations that must be explicitly distinguished, not merely translated.
| Term | Competing Association | Fencing Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| बिथान (law) | Brahma Dharma’s own codified religious-conduct rules (धर्मनि नियम); risk of “works of the law” being reheard as generic rule-keeping rather than the specific Torah-observance controversy. | Consistently qualify with “Mosinni bithan” (Moses’ law) framing in teaching notes; never let बिथान stand for religious rule-keeping in general. |
| दान root (grace / self-giving of Christ / bearing burdens) | Bathou/Kherai reciprocal ritual-offering exchange logic (do-ut-des); Brahma Dharma’s पुण्य merit ethic. | Grace and self-giving must be explicitly taught as one-directional and unearned in every occurrence; burden-bearing must be kept terminologically distinct from both दान compounds to avoid merit-transfer resonance. |
| गाव (flesh) | Ordinary Bodo usage for “body” carries no inherent moral valence; risk of the ethical “sinful nature” sense (5:13-24) being flattened to the neutral “body” sense, or vice versa. | Mandatory sense-specifying translator note at every occurrence. |
| प्रेम (love/agapē) | Brahma Dharma’s devotional bhakti-love register (affective devotion directed upward to a chosen deity). | Explicitly teach agapē as God’s/Christ’s prior, self-giving love and the church’s willed, active love for one another — not devotional affect directed at a deity. |
| स्वाधीनता (freedom) | Contemporary Bodoland political-autonomy/territorial discourse. | Explicit disambiguation at first occurrence (5:1): this freedom is neither political independence nor the मोक्ष-style cosmic liberation forbidden elsewhere. |
| अभिशाप (curse — law’s curse, and reused for anathema) | Folk-belief curses and black-magic affliction traditionally addressed by an ओझा. | Teach both κατάρα and ἀνάθεμα as solemn, unappealable covenantal/apostolic pronouncements — not removable ritual afflictions subject to counter-ritual reversal. |
| बुनाय/दाननाय (sow/reap) | Kherai puja’s veneration of Mainao, goddess of wealth and rice, sought for agricultural abundance. | Explicit note: Paul’s agricultural image illustrates moral-spiritual cause-and-effect, not a fertility-ritual appeal for harvest. |
| गर्ब (boasting) | Bodo clan (afad) lineage-pride and honor/status culture. | Name the cultural parallel directly in teaching, then contrast illegitimate self-boasting with legitimate boasting only in Christ’s cross. |
| पूर्खा नि नियम (ancestral tradition) | General clan-ancestral custom loyalty, and specifically ancestral household spirit veneration (already a forbidden Holy-Spirit substitution in the Romans baseline). | Clarify Paul describes his own prior religious inheritance neutrally/critically as personal biography, without devaluing ancestral custom as a category; name the parallel explicitly rather than leaving it silently implicit. |
| खम (pillars, metaphorical) | The sijou plant’s literal, ritually significant central-courtyard placement in Bathou household practice. | Brief translator note clarifying this is a purely architectural leadership metaphor, non-ritual. |
| बिश्वास (faith / faithfulness homonym in fruit of the Spirit) | Saving-faith sense fixed everywhere else in the glossary. | Flag explicitly as “faithfulness” (character trait) at 5:22; never let this occurrence be read as saving faith. |
Part 3 — Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Decision Type | Terms | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Transliterate (loanword retained) | जिसु, मसीह, अब्बा, अब्राहाम, हागार, सारा, इस्राएल, बाप्तिस्मा, खुरुस, ओझा (referenced only in notes, not as a biblical term) | Proper names and one ordinance-term (baptism) follow established regional Bible-translation convention (cf. Hindi/Assamese cognates); transliteration avoids inventing a new descriptive phrase for names/rites that already have a settled, recognizable form across South Asian Christian usage. खुरुस specifically must denote the literal execution-instrument/atoning event, never a decorative symbol. |
| Paraphrase / descriptive compound (built from existing Bodo roots) | बिथाननि गुनथि (works of the law), मसीहजों समान खुरुसाव गोथाखानाय (crucified with Christ), बिथाननि रखिया (guardian/tutor), दाम होनाय फोरायनाय (redeemed), दुनिया नि गिबि नियम (elemental spirits), नतुन सृष्टि (new creation — paraphrase despite सृष्टि’s loaded cosmological resonance, because no less-loaded alternative exists), प्रेमजों बिश्वास काम खालामो (faith working through love), एकबेनि बजन बिफांदो लांबो (bear one another’s burdens), गोरोबथाव खालामबाय (bewitched, rhetorical rendering) | No single existing Bodo word carries these compound theological ideas; each requires a built phrase combining already-attested roots, following the same pattern the Romans baseline used for justification, imputed righteousness, and incarnation. Each such compound is provisional pending theologian confirmation per the baseline’s own precedent. |
| Reuse existing Sanskrit/Assamese-loan religious vocabulary with explicit fencing (neither pure transliteration nor pure paraphrase) | बिथान (law), अभिशाप (curse/anathema), प्रेम (love), स्वाधीनता (freedom), खतना (circumcision), मध्यस्थ (mediator), गर्ब (boasting) | These words already exist in ordinary or Brahma Dharma-inflected Bodo religious register; reusing them is more natural than inventing new compounds, but each requires an explicit fencing note (Part 2.2) to prevent the term importing its non-biblical associations wholesale. |
| Retained from Romans baseline without modification (verbatim enforcement) | All Table 1 terms in 08_core_glossary.md (gospel, grace, faith, righteousness, justification, law, sin, gentiles, apostle, called/calling, peace, Son of God, God, Holy Spirit, Father, Abba, adoption, Jesus, Christ, covenant, Israel, kingdom of God, church) | Hard rule: baseline renderings must never be altered. Cross-curriculum consistency is itself a doctrinal-fidelity requirement per the Theological Consistency Rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md. |
Part 4 — Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × syncretism/collision risk × absence of a ready-made native equivalent). All Rank 1-9 items require mandatory human theologian review; Rank 10-13 require native-speaker review at minimum.
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Crucified with Christ (2:19-20) — Critical. The core passage’s central doctrinal term; a genuine conceptual gap with three simultaneous wrong-direction pulls available in local religious vocabulary (Kherai-trance possession, rebirth-cycle imagery, martyrdom-merit). No fallback phrase exists if the built compound fails to land.
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Elemental spirits / basic principles of the world (4:3,9) — Critical. A single wrong lexical choice (reaching for ha/dwi/bar/or/okhrang) would make Paul appear to be naming Bathou cosmology by its own sacred vocabulary, inverting his argument that reversion to the law is spiritually equivalent to pagan bondage.
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New creation (6:15) — Critical. सृष्टि’s default cyclical-cosmology resonance (reinforced by Brahma Dharma’s Sanskritized cosmological teaching) runs directly counter to Paul’s one-time, definitive, non-cyclical claim; no less-loaded native alternative exists.
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Works of the law (2:16; 3:2,5,10) — Critical. The letter’s central antithesis to grace; collision risk with BOTH live comparative frameworks simultaneously (Bathou reciprocal-offering logic and Brahma Dharma merit ethic), a double-fronted risk not present for any single Romans term.
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Grace vs. works/merit/ritual-exchange, escalated by Galatians 2:21 and 5:4 — Critical. Sharper single-sentence grace-works incompatibility statements than anywhere in Romans; requires the reader to hold two simultaneous negations (not merit, not ritual exchange) in view at once.
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Bewitched (3:1) — Critical. Highest risk of unintended literal affirmation: a rhetorical idiom sitting directly on top of a real, currently practiced village fear (evil-eye/curse affliction addressed by an ओझा); mistranslation here could be read as Scripture endorsing occult affliction as real and operative on the Galatians.
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Flesh (σάρξ), triple-sense across 2:16, 2:20, 5:13-24, 6:8 — High. Highest per-occurrence cognitive load of any term in the letter: one lexeme, three distinct senses, concentrated most densely in chapter 5’s flesh/Spirit contrast, where a wrong sense-selection at any single verse can invert Paul’s ethical argument.
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Curse of the law / Anathema (3:10,13; 1:8-9) — High. Same lexeme root shared across two distinct referents (covenantal condemnation vs. apostolic pronouncement), both sitting adjacent to real folk-magic curse-and-reversal practice; risk of readers assuming a ritually removable affliction rather than a solemn, unappealable declaration.
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Freedom (ἐλευθερία, 5:1,13) — High. A doctrine-title term using a live secular-political lexeme (स्वाधीनता) in a region where ethnic-territorial autonomy is a genuinely contested contemporary category; risk of the doctrine being reheard as political rather than theological.
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Adoption / Heir, intensified slave-heir contrast (4:1-7) — High. Direct challenge to settled Bodo clan (afad) birth-lineage inheritance custom; the doctrine’s central claim (adoptive sonship = full inheritance parity) is not a cultural given and requires ground-up teaching, not assumption.
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Seed of Abraham, singular-to-corporate argument (3:16, 3:29) — High. Structurally parallel to the baseline’s “seed of David,” but requires an additional interpretive step (singular fulfillment, then corporate inclusion) that has no shortcut through existing birth-lineage thinking.
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Faith working through love (5:6) — High. Risk of undoing the justification-by-faith-alone doctrine taught via the same letter’s core passage, if love is misheard as a supplementary work rather than faith’s necessary expression.
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Sow/reap agricultural image (6:7-8) — High. Direct collision with Mainao-directed harvest-ritual expectation in Kherai puja; without explicit fencing, hearers may assimilate Paul’s moral-causality point into an agricultural-fertility framework.
Summary for Phase 2 Handoff
This gap analysis confirms that Galatians’ translation-risk profile is structurally different from, and in several respects more concentrated than, the Romans baseline’s: fewer entirely novel doctrines, but a higher density of doctrine-title terms sitting directly on top of live, currently practiced comparative-religion collision points (Kherai-trance possession, evil-eye/curse belief, Mainao harvest ritual, clan-lineage inheritance custom, Bodoland political-autonomy discourse, and Brahma Dharma’s merit ethic and cyclical cosmology). All items in Part 4 above must be loaded into Phase 2’s escalation routing in addition to the existing Romans-baseline forbidden-substitution list, and the Galatians-specific forbidden-substitution items already flagged in 08_core_glossary.md and bible_term_registry.json (elemental spirits’ five-element vocabulary; new creation’s सृष्टि without explanatory framing; bewitched’s literal-sorcery reading) must be treated as hard blocks, not soft preferences.