WHY PUNICODEX EXISTS
The gods have been renamed. The ASCII web flattened Ἀπόλλων into "Apollo" — shedding the acute accent that carries the pitch, the macron that carries the length — and with the marks went part of the name itself. This was never a technical necessity; it was a habit the early web formed and the modern web forgot to correct. PuniCodex exists to put the marks back: the original names of the gods carry diacritics, and those diacritics are meaning, not decoration.
What began as a significant personal investment in Unicode domains — the restored names, registered one by one in their proper orthography — became something larger than a portfolio. Each domain demanded an argument: a character breakdown, a citation, a defensible reason for every mark. The portfolio became a scholarly lexicon of 895 restorations across 22 pantheons. The lexicon became a search engine for the Unicode web. And the domains themselves became digital temples — 196 of them built out as flagships — with a leasing platform that lets sponsors occupy them with the same care they were built with.
The standard is philological, not decorative. Every restoration is argued from the sources — Liddell-Scott-Jones, Beekes, Faulkner — and every accent either survives that scrutiny or does not ship. The discipline hardened into the tier doctrine: a name is Tier-1 only when its restoration is mechanically verifiable as information-rich, and dual-tier only when the philology itself admits more than one valid spelling. Accuracy is the product. Everything else — the temples, the engine, the marketplace — is distribution.
The work is larger than one person, and it was always meant to be. PuniCodex welcomes sponsors who would rather put their mark on a temple than on a banner, scholars who hold the sources as closely as we do, and universities willing to build the Scholarly Edition into something the classics can cite. If that is you, the door is open.