docs(rules): P3's examples were all single-letter conjunctions

Every P3 example used y, E or И — the carve-out cases — so the
ordinary multi-letter join was never shown, and the boundary line
("Juan y Garcia" keeps y a name word) read as if three-word names
never join at all. Two contrast examples fix it: the same shape with
"and" joins, and so does "&", which is single-character but not a
letter. Measured, the predicate is len(text) == 1 and total < 4 and
text.isalpha().

The prose now says the carve-out reaches every single-letter
connective the vocabulary holds — Cyrillic и/і/й and Arabic و, not
just the two Latin ones — while the capital veto reaches only the
Latin ones, which is the asymmetry #383 is open about.

decisions.md#3-0-reevaluations gets the locale consequence: Spanish,
Portuguese and Dutch each want a different subset of single letters
joined, so a locale pack would have to carry the join threshold and
the initial veto as per-word policy. That is a stronger requirement
than yesterday's particle entry, which only asked packs to override
vocabulary membership.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Author: derek73

docs/design/decisions.md

@@ -545,3 +545,4 @@ Promoted 2026-08-15 from session memory (Derek's 2026-07-30 ask; promotion appro
 - (B) The 1.3.0-era legacy-pickle property-key skip (suffixes_prefixes_titles in old blobs) rides in the shim's __setstate__ and dies with it.
 - (B) The FAMILY_COMMA doctrine (rule W3): inherited from v1's lastname-comma but correct on its own terms — an explicit comma is stronger evidence than script.
 - (A) 2026-08-17 — PARTICLE VOCABULARY AS LOCALE PACKS. Raised while reversing the order-independence decision above: every argument in the leading-particle thread is a language judgement wearing a position heuristic. `de` and `do` lead surnames in Vietnamese, `von` is German, `dos` Portuguese, `das` both Portuguese and a borne Bengali surname — and the per-word comments in nameparser/config/particles.py cite exactly these traditions as their justification. Locale packs already exist (ru, tr_az, zh, ja) and already carry vocabulary and rotations, so particles are the obvious next tenant: a caller who knows the tradition could opt into a tuned set instead of the parser splitting the difference globally. Not 2.x work — it needs the packs to carry vocabulary OVERRIDES rather than additions, and it would give C-i's positional qualifier a per-locale answer rather than one global one.
+- (A) 2026-08-18 — LOCALE CONTROL OF P3's SINGLE-LETTER CARVE-OUT, and the sharper requirement it puts on the entry above: a pack would have to carry per-word POLICY, not just membership. Which single letters a tradition wants joined differs by language — Spanish writes "y" and would want "e" read as an initial, Portuguese wants the reverse, Dutch would want every single letter read as an initial. One global rule serves all three today: a single ALPHABETIC character in a name of fewer than four pieces stays a name word, and a bare Latin capital never joins (#383). It is v1's Google Code issue 11 fix ("john e smith") generalized to a vocabulary v1 did not have — the set now holds six single-letter conjunctions (y, e, и, і, й, و), and the carve-out reaches all of them because it counts characters, while the capital veto reaches only the Latin ones because it tests a Latin shape. That asymmetry is the visible seam and it is why #383 is open. A pack that could only ADD or REPLACE vocabulary could not express any of it; the join threshold and the initial veto would have to be per-word, per-pack values. Measured while documenting P3: "&" is single-character but not a letter, so it joins at any length ("Juan & Garcia" is one part while "Juan y Garcia" is three).

docs/design/rules.md

@@ -156,8 +156,16 @@ P3. Rationale: connective words ("y", "of the") bind name words into
       "Juan y Eva Garcia"         →  given="Juan y Eva"
       "Jose E Maria Santos"       →  middle="E Maria"
       "Juan y Garcia"             →  middle="y"  · boundary
+      "Juan and Garcia"           →  given="Juan and Garcia"
+      "Juan & Garcia"             →  given="Juan & Garcia"
       "Mr. Jack and Jill"         →  family="Jack and Jill"
       "Mr. Jack Jill"             →  given="Jack"  · boundary
+    Both exceptions are about the written FORM, not the word: the
+    three-word carve-out counts letters, so a symbol connective joins
+    at any length, and it reaches every single-letter connective the
+    vocabulary holds — Cyrillic и/і/й and Arabic و as well as y and
+    e. Which single letters a tradition actually wants joined differs
+    by language, and no locale gets its own answer today.
     Accepted: the initial veto is a LATIN shape — a Cyrillic
     capital joins ("И".isupper() is true, so this is not a
     Unicode-uppercase rule); #267's closure blessed the Cyrillic