The canonical register: Bāguà
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Bāguà, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Bāguà to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as 八卦, as Yijing (Book of Changes) and Wilhelm/Baynes, I Ching preserve it. On the evidence, it means "Eight trigrams". The canonical transliteration is Bāguà.
And the marks themselves: a → ā (Long vowel); a → à (Stress on a). 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: bAH-GWAH — first syllable high and level, second syllable falling (high to low) like a command. 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 bagua 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: bagua may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → ā, a → à — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Bagua: it comes from the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself, and it fails because every substitution here (ā→a, à→a) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Bāguà is shared by Confucian, Daoist, and folk-religious traditions, each giving the trigrams a different emphasis. Confucians read them as moral archetypes; Daoists use them in talismans and internal alchemy; feng shui masters arrange buildings by their directions.
And it never stopped working. The Bāguà are everywhere once you know how to look. The Korean flag places four of the trigrams at its corners; martial artists practice Baguazhang, the Eight Trigram Palm, walking in circles that map the directions; computer scientists and designers use the Unicode trigram block (U+2630–U+2637) as glyphs for menus and progress indicators.
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: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u. 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.
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
Bāguà is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form bagua 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 Bāguà stands at /sites/bagua/.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Bagua first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: a → ā, a → à; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — Yijing (Book of Changes), Wilhelm/Baynes, I Ching, Shaughnessy, I Ching: The Classic of Changes.
The Register Continues
Entry 50 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: Ọbalúayé (read it) · next entry: Bꜣstt (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.