The Spark
Why Do the Gods Live in ASCII?
It started with a domain search. Zeus.com — taken. Apollo.com — taken. Every familiar Latin variant was already registered under other uses. The gods of Olympus had been evicted from their own names.
But then a thought: what if we don't use the English spellings? What if we use the Greek?
Not the Greek alphabet — that would be zeus.gr and miss the point entirely. But the transliterated Greek, with its pitch accents and macrons preserved. Zeús. Apóllōn. Names that carry the full weight of their originals, encoded in Unicode, readable by any modern browser, yet invisible to plain-ASCII search tools.
The Philosophy
Linguistic Justice in the Digital Age
The erasure of diacritics is not a technical limitation. It is a cultural amnesia. When Apóllōn becomes "Apollo," something irreplaceable is lost: the pitch accent that rises like a musical note, the long vowels that stretch across syllables like held breath.
Greek is not English with funny marks. It is a language where accent means pitch — a rising tone that changes meaning, that carries emotion, that makes a name a summons rather than a label.
PuniCodex exists to say: the marks matter. The macron on the e in Hera is not decoration. It is the difference between a short syllable and a long one, between a name whispered and a name proclaimed.
The System
What the Restoration Preserves
As the collection grew, a pattern emerged: every restored spelling can say exactly what it preserves that ASCII cannot — its stress, its vowel length, a letter outside the Latin alphabet. That description is now computed mechanically from the form itself, for all 983 names. No editorial rank, no label a form cannot support.
And because most ancient names were never spelled one way, each temple enumerates the name's full spelling space — every attested variant with its scholarly sources, the systematic convention forms other standards would produce, and the derived subsets of the restoration. Ownership is an annotation on that family, never a gate. Four names own multiple live domain spellings: Apollon, Hekate, Nike, and Poseidon.
The Vision
What Comes Next
983 temples built. The Pantheon is not complete — it never will be. New archetypes wait in the wings — Hindu is next, alongside ever deeper Egyptian and Mesopotamian collections. Every culture has names that have been flattened by ASCII.
The mission is simple: restore what was erased. One domain. One diacritic. One archetype at a time.