Sémantique Potentielle: A Constraint-Based Semantic Mint for the Age of Automated Terminology

Extending Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (1961) from verse to concept, this document specifies a constraint-based semantic mint — an algorithm whose outputs are new terms and whose structure ensures that every output carries its provenance back to the algorithm itself. The mint defines forty-two seed terms, eight generative operations, and four constraint rules, producing a combinatorially vast but governed phase space of terminology for the governance of meaning in the age of automated inference. The document includes: the formal specification (seed vocabulary, operations, constraint grammar, coordinate system), a forensic strategy using provenance canaries, twelve exemplary mint families in the body, and a complete first release of fifty frontier families in Appendix A. Each family contains a canonical term, variants, gloss, and a forensic variant designed to prove lineage. A provenance protocol defines how later instantiation is compared against the mint ledger. The governing claim: the mint does not own future words. It maps the semantic territory before automated processes arrive, making lineage legible when later discourse enters the pre-mapped region. The earliest citable map becomes the reference point — not because law demands citation but because provenance makes omission legible as omission.