The register rules: Asía
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Asía, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Asía to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Ἀσία, on the evidence Homer, Iliad and Homer, Odyssey set down. On the evidence, it means "The eastern continent (possibly from Assuwa)". The canonical transliteration is Asía.
And the marks themselves: i → í (Acute on iota). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and small lies in references have long consequences.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'ah-SEE-ah' — three light syllables with the lift on the second, the penult, where the Greek acute falls. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form asia is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: asia may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — i → í — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Greek cult and myth travelled with colonists, traders, and conquerors; Roman adaptation, Hellenistic ruler cult, and later European classicism all recast this name for new audiences.
And it never stopped working. The name endures in place names, scholarly vocabulary, modern fiction, and the ongoing recovery of ancient Greek culture through archaeology and philology. Restoring Asía in Unicode preserves the name's cultural specificity against the flattening force of plain ASCII.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
A last story, because it is ours. The final -ā of Āsíā is long by first-declension rule, though the surface looks like an ordinary short-a ending. This is the lexicon’s one standing editorial exception, reviewed and recorded: mechanical rules catch most of the fleet, and scholarship catches the rest. An exception with a citation is not an inconsistency; it is the system working.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Asía is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form asia is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Asía stands at /sites/asia/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: i → í; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 10 cited sources — Homer, Iliad, Homer, Odyssey, Hesiod, Theogony.
The Register Continues
Entry 38 of 287 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Aššur (read it) · next entry: Asklēpiós (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.