]> Alter Meridian Pty Ltd

blake@truealter.com

This document defines an identity pronoun grammar as a reference axis orthogonal to the ~handle identity tier taxonomy defined in draft-morrison-mcp-dns-discovery and draft-morrison-identity-attributed-commits. A pronoun is a session-scoped reference that resolves client-side to a concrete handle using local session state before any cryptographic, DNS, or federation operation. The entity-class taxonomy (Sovereign, Bot, Instrument) is unchanged; this specification introduces Absolute vs Pronoun as an orthogonal axis. A pronoun MUST NOT appear in a capability token, in a DNS record, in an Accord signature, or in any inter-organisational protocol payload. This document defines a single Wave-1 pronoun, ~org, that resolves to the concrete handle of the organisation bound to the caller's current session. An appendix defines a relative-path pronoun grammar (e.g. ~./finance, ~../compliance) as a non-normative design surface for future work. The mechanism is provider-neutral, introduces no new cryptographic primitive, and adds no load to DNS, capability-token issuers, or federated resolvers.

Introduction The ~handle identity primitive defined in binds a textual identifier to a cryptographic principal via DNS TXT records under an _alter. prefix. The tier taxonomy defined in partitions handles into three parser-enforced entity classes, Sovereign, Bot, and Instrument, each with distinct capabilities and invariants. The three-tier taxonomy classifies what a handle binds to. This document covers how a handle is referenced. A reference may be absolute (a literal handle transmitted on the wire) or pronominal (a session-scoped reference resolved by the client before transmission). Every pronoun resolves to one of the three entity classes at evaluation time; the entity taxonomy is unchanged. The motivating use case is multi-organisational identity. A human agent who is a member of two organisations requires a pronoun that resolves to "the organisation bound to my current session" without hard-coding either organisation's concrete handle into the agent's command surface. A shell user relies on the same pattern when ~ resolves to $HOME for the invoking user rather than any specific directory path. Git relies on HEAD and @{upstream} as reflexive references. CSS relies on :root and :host as grammar-level contextual references. Kubernetes relies on :self as a protocol-level reflexive subject. Each of these precedents shares three properties. The pronoun is (1) part of the surface grammar, (2) resolved before the underlying protocol sees it, and (3) absent from any payload that crosses a trust boundary. This specification adopts the same three properties for the ~handle system.

Conventions and Definitions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here. The following terms are defined for the purposes of this document:

Handle

A textual identifier of the form ~ followed by a label, as defined in . An absolute handle such as ~alice corresponds to the alter: URI alter:~alice defined in . Absolute handle

A handle whose textual form is identical to the handle it identifies (e.g. ~alice, ~example.com). Pronoun

A handle whose textual form is a reserved reference expression that resolves to a concrete absolute handle via a defined resolution algorithm (e.g. ~org, ~me). Concrete handle

The absolute handle produced by resolving a pronoun, as opposed to the pronoun's surface form. Resolution

The operation of replacing a pronoun with its concrete handle in a given context. Session state

The set of bindings available to a client at the time of resolution, including but not limited to the caller's sovereign handle, the caller's currently-bound organisation, and any pronoun lexicon loaded by the caller's client. Wire

Any transport boundary crossed by an identity-bearing payload, including capability tokens, DNS records, MCP tool invocations, HTTP requests to federated peers, and signatures attached to Accord documents.

The Reference Axis

Two Orthogonal Axes The ~handle identity system has two orthogonal axes. The first axis is entity class, defined in : Sovereign | Bot | Instrument The second axis, defined by this document, is reference type: Absolute | Pronoun Every handle is a point in the two-dimensional space defined by these axes. An Absolute Sovereign is a concrete handle such as ~alice. A Pronoun Sovereign is a reference such as ~org that resolves to a concrete Sovereign handle at evaluation time. An Absolute Bot is ~example-deps.bot. A Pronoun Bot is a reference such as ~my-runtime.bot (non-normative example) that resolves to the concrete Bot handle of the caller's currently-active runtime daemon. A pronoun's entity class is a property of the concrete handle produced by resolution, not of the pronoun itself.

Wire Invariant A pronoun MUST NOT appear in a typed handle field of any structured payload that crosses a protocol trust boundary. Before any of the following operations, a pronoun appearing in a handle field MUST be resolved to its concrete handle:

1. Any DNS query or DNS record publication under the _alter. prefix or any other DNS label used for ~handle resolution.
2. Issuance or verification of any capability token whose subject, audience, or resource identifier references a handle.
3. Any cryptographic signing or verification operation over an identity-bearing payload, including but not limited to Accord documents , Identity-Attributed commit trailers , attestation statements, and reputation claims about a handle.
4. Any MCP tool invocation, HTTP request to a federated peer's .well-known/alter endpoint, or other protocol payload in which a handle appears as a typed field.
5. Any write to an append-only identity log, a long-lived record of events attributed to a handle, or a Signed Tree Head anchor.
6. Any on-chain reference, smart-contract call, or blockchain anchoring operation (e.g. x402 micropayment routing) that encodes a handle as a contract parameter.

This enumeration is non-exhaustive. The governing principle is that a pronoun is a property of the caller's session context and MUST NOT be transmitted to any principal who does not share that session context. The Wire Invariant applies to handle fields in structured payloads. A handle field is a field typed as "handle" in a payload schema or a positional argument documented as carrying a handle. The invariant does not apply to natural-language content that incidentally contains a pronoun token, such as the body of a message between members, a user prompt, or a documentation string. A client MUST NOT rewrite pronoun tokens appearing inside free-text content; such content is conveyed verbatim and a remote reader is responsible for recognising that a pronoun in free text is scoped to the author's session, not the reader's. A client MAY surface a usability warning when free-text content contains pronoun tokens, but MUST NOT transform the content. This invariant is why pronouns are defined in this document rather than as an extension of the entity-class taxonomy. Pronouns belong to the client's presentation layer and concrete handles to the protocol. A conformant implementation MUST reject any payload received over the wire in which a pronoun appears in a typed handle field. The rejection treats the payload as a category error, analogous to the cross-tier rejection defined in .

Resolution Algorithm Resolution is performed by the client immediately prior to the first operation listed in the Wire Invariant above. The resolution algorithm proceeds in three phases. Phase 1 is lexicon lookup. The client maintains a pronoun lexicon mapping reserved textual forms to resolver functions. If the handle's textual form does not match any entry in the loaded lexicon, the handle is treated as absolute and no further resolution is performed. Phase 2 is context binding. The resolver function is invoked with the current session state. Session state MUST include at minimum the caller's sovereign handle; it MAY include the caller's currently-bound organisation, the caller's currently-held roles, the current thread identifier, and any other context the pronoun's resolver requires. Phase 3 is substitution. The resolver returns a concrete handle or an error. On success, the pronoun is replaced with the concrete handle in the payload about to be transmitted. On error, the operation that triggered resolution MUST be aborted; the pronoun MUST NOT be transmitted unresolved as a fallback. A conformant resolver MUST be deterministic within a single session: two successive resolutions of the same pronoun within the same session state MUST yield the same concrete handle.

The ~org Pronoun (Wave 1)

Definition ~org is a Sovereign-class pronoun that resolves to the concrete sovereign handle of the organisation currently bound to the caller's session.

Session Binding The session state that binds ~org is established at authentication time (typically by a command of the form alter login <handle> or equivalent). The binding is recorded in a session-state artefact local to the caller's environment, and MUST contain at least the field current_org whose value is the concrete sovereign handle of the bound organisation. On reference implementations, a file at the path $HOME/.config/alter/session.json is RECOMMENDED. A client MAY provide a switch command (e.g. alter switch <handle>) that rewrites current_org without requiring re-authentication, provided the caller is already a verified member of the target organisation.

Resolution Failures ~org resolution MUST fail, and the triggering operation MUST be aborted, if any of the following hold:

• The session-state artefact is absent or unreadable.
• The current_org field is absent, empty, or malformed.
• The caller is no longer a verified member of the bound organisation (e.g. revocation has occurred since session start).

A resolution failure is distinct from an absolute handle referencing a non-existent organisation. The latter fails at protocol layer; the former fails at client layer before any wire operation.

Example (non-normative) A member bound to ~example-org via alter login ~example-org invokes a messaging command: alter message send --to ~org --body "what is due this week?" The client resolves ~org to ~example-org by reading current_org from session state. The outbound capability-token subject field carries ~example-org; the pronoun ~org does not appear on the wire. The same member subsequently invokes alter switch ~example-co (an organisation they are a member of via a separate invitation). The next invocation of the same command resolves ~org to ~example-co instead. Neither invocation requires the member to retype the concrete handle.

Pronoun Lexicon Extensibility

Per-Client Lexicon An implementation MAY load a pronoun lexicon from any source trusted by the operator. The minimal lexicon defined by this document contains ~org only. Additional pronouns MAY be added by the client without coordination with any other party, provided the Wire Invariant is preserved.

Per-Org Lexicon (Future Work) A future revision of this document is expected to define a DNS-based mechanism by which an organisation MAY publish a pronoun lexicon as part of its _alter.<domain> record, enabling members of that organisation to load org-specific pronouns (e.g. ~reviewer resolving to the current holder of the reviewer role within that org). Such pronouns MUST obey the Wire Invariant: the DNS record carries the lexicon metadata, not resolved values, and resolution remains a client-side operation. This extension is out of scope for the present document. The protocol-version constant defined by is not incremented.

Relative-Path Pronoun Grammar (Appendix, Non-Normative) This appendix describes a relative-path pronoun grammar as a design surface for future work. The grammar is non-normative in the present document; implementations SHOULD NOT emit these forms in Wave 1. The grammar borrows from POSIX path semantics :

• ~./<label> selects <label> within the scope of the caller's current organisation (e.g. ~./finance resolves to the current holder of the finance role within current_org).
• ~../<label> selects <label> within the scope of the parent organisation in the caller's current Accord chain (e.g. ~../compliance resolves to the compliance role of the Accord counter-party).
• ~/<label> is reserved and MUST NOT be used; the syntax would be ambiguous with respect to absolute handle forms.

Relative-path pronouns, if standardised in a future revision, obey the Wire Invariant identically to ~org: resolution happens client-side and the concrete handle is what crosses any wire. The grammar is a design surface rather than a Wave-1 normative construct because its purpose is to disambiguate scope when more than one lexicon is loaded. A per-org lexicon (Section 5.2) addressing a pronoun such as ~finance is sufficient when a member is bound to a single organisation. In a multi-organisational scenario, however, a member whose client loads the lexicons of two organisations both defining ~finance faces a collision: which organisation's finance role does the bare pronoun resolve to? A relative-path form (~./finance = finance role of current organisation; ~../finance = finance role of the Accord counter-party) makes the scope explicit at the call site. The ambiguity is removed, and the client needs no precedence rule that may not match caller intent. The grammar is deferred to a future revision for three reasons. First, no implementation deployment has yet exercised the multi-lexicon scenario that motivates the grammar. Second, the parent-organisation scope-chain semantics (~../) require coordination with the Accord Protocol that has not yet been specified in sufficient detail. Third, filing the grammar early without implementation evidence risks committing to path-traversal semantics that a future implementation may reveal to be incorrect. Filing the grammar as a non-normative appendix records the design space without committing any implementation to it.

IANA Considerations This document introduces no new IANA registry. Pronoun lexicons are client-local artefacts; they are not enumerated by any registry. A future revision of this document that defines a DNS-based per-org lexicon mechanism (see Section 5.2) will require a lexicon TXT record sub-field to be registered in the _alter. record schema defined by . That registration is out of scope for the present document.

Security Considerations

Pronoun Spoofing An attacker capable of writing to the caller's session-state artefact (e.g. the session.json file under $HOME/.config/alter/) can cause ~org to resolve to an attacker-controlled handle. This attack is a local privilege-escalation class and is outside the scope of this specification; implementations SHOULD protect session-state artefacts with the same filesystem permissions applied to other credential artefacts.

Pronoun Leakage An implementation that mistakenly transmits a pronoun on the wire (e.g. by failing to resolve before token issuance) creates two hazards: (1) the receiving peer rejects the payload as specified in Section 3.2, exposing the caller's misconfiguration; (2) the pronoun's textual form may leak information about the caller's client topology. Conformant implementations MUST resolve pronouns before any wire operation; test suites SHOULD include explicit coverage of Wire Invariant violations.

Binding Freshness ~org resolution depends on session state that may have been written arbitrarily long before the current invocation. A client MAY cache the membership proof; if the caller has been revoked from the bound organisation since session start, a stale binding could cause a resolution that the organisation's membership system would reject at protocol layer. Implementations SHOULD re-verify membership freshness at resolution time when the resolved handle is about to be used for a high-privilege operation (e.g. Accord signature).

Cross-Tenant Confusion A member of two organisations who invokes a command against ~org must be unambiguous about which organisation is bound. Clients SHOULD surface the currently-bound organisation in user-visible status (a status line, prompt decoration, or equivalent) so that the member cannot mistakenly send a message intended for one organisation to the other.

Implementation Status This section is to be removed before final publication. A reference implementation of this specification is planned in the ~alter open-source codebase; no implementation of the pronoun resolver exists at the time of this -04 revision. Implementation is expected to be distributed across three surfaces:

1. The alter-cli command-line interface will maintain the current_org field in a session.json file under $HOME/.config/alter/ via alter login and alter switch.
2. The personal alter MCP bridge (mcp-alter) will load the minimal Wave-1 lexicon and perform resolution prior to any outbound MCP call.
3. Client-side slash-command wrappers will consume the resolver via the personal alter bridge and MUST NOT implement their own pronoun grammar.

Normative References In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the defined special meanings. Alter Meridian Pty Ltd Alter Meridian Pty Ltd Alter Meridian Pty Ltd Informative References Alter Meridian Pty Ltd

Acknowledgements This document builds on the ~handle identity primitive defined in and the three-tier handle taxonomy of , which classifies what kind of thing a handle binds to. This document addresses how the handle is referenced, and treats pronouns as a reference axis orthogonal to entity class rather than as a fourth tier.

Document History draft-morrison-identity-pronouns-04 (October 2026): A refresh revision. No normative requirement is added or removed.

• Replaces the hand-typed BCP 14 key-words paragraph in Section 2 with the standard boilerplate.
• Section 3.2 describes two records and one kind of message in plain terms where -03 used terms this document never defined.
• Section 3.3, Section 5.2 and Section 6 speak of roles held within an organisation, and the example pronouns in the Abstract and Section 5.2 are renamed to match.
• The Abstract and Section 5.1 no longer attribute the ~org definition and the minimal lexicon to a reference implementation, since Section 9 states that none exists yet.
• The example in Section 4.4 uses ~example-org as the bound organisation.
• Section 8.1 and Section 8.3 no longer use BCP 14 key words where no requirement is stated.
• Rewrites Appendix A to describe what the document builds on.
• Updates the revision named in Section 9.
• Sets the definitions in Section 2 as a definition list, rewrites sentences in Sections 1, 3 and 6 in plainer terms, and removes emphasis capitals outside BCP 14 key words. No requirement changes.
• States in Section 2 that an absolute handle corresponds to an alter: URI, and adds an informative reference to .