The canonical register: Arete

Court is in session. In the matter of Arete, the register hears the evidence — the attestation, the marks, and the forms that stand accused.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Arete
• Original script: Ἀρετή
• Pantheon: Greek
• Convention: the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write
• False forms on record: 0
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 47 of 542

The Charge

That the name Arete is routinely written in forms that move, drop, or invent its marks — and that each such form teaches the reader a different, lesser name. The register's task is to separate the honest fallback from the outright false.

The Defense of the Canonical Form

The name is attested as Ἀρετή, as Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.21-34 (Prodicus' allegory) and Homer, Odyssey 7.53-77 (Arete, queen of the Phaeacians) preserve it. On the evidence, it means "Excellence, virtue". The canonical transliteration is Arete.

No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write demands.

The Character Witness

The plain form arete differs from the canonical Arete only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.

Mitigating Circumstances

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Arete. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

Why These Marks Exist at All

Greek diacritics are a preservation technology. The acute marks pitch rising; the circumflex marks pitch rising and falling; the macron marks time — how long the vowel is held. The first two were invented by Hellenistic scholars to save the accent as speech flattened; the last matters because Greek meter is built from long and short syllables the way music is built from beats. A transliteration that keeps these is not "decorated" — it is the difference between the name as evidence and the name as guesswork. This register holds to the restored-stress convention because it is the convention that keeps the evidence.

Registration, Honestly

Three facts govern every domain this project registers. One: IDNA 2008 welcomes the marks — punycode encodes them legally and browsers show them faithfully. Two: welcome is not availability — registrars hold partial inventory, so the ideal form of a name may exist in the protocol yet not in the shop window today. Three: typeability is a separate virtue — a form no one can type on a phone is a form no one will visit, however canonical.

Hence the hierarchy the rulebook enforces: take the most complete form that is both attested and actually registrable, and never accept a wrong mark for the sake of availability. The wrong accent is not a rung on that ladder; it is off the ladder entirely.

The Verdict

So the register finds: Arete, canonical; arete, equally canonical; the contested forms, recorded with their support; the false forms, ruled against with their violations named. Every line of that finding cites its evidence, and the evidence is open to any reader — the register asks to be checked, not trusted. The temple keeps the canonical form at /arete/.

The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.21-34 (Prodicus' allegory), Homer, Odyssey 7.53-77 (Arete, queen of the Phaeacians), Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

The Register Continues

The register holds 542 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.

Continue the register — previous entry: Árēs (read it) · next entry: Árgos (read it).

The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.