The register rules: Bhakti
The internet spells Bhakti more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Bhakti
- Original script: भक्ति
- Pantheon: Sanskrit
- Convention: IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
- False forms on record: 1
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 92 of 597
The Canonical Form
The attested form is भक्ति, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Bhakti.
No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration demands.
Where the Flattened Form Stands
The plain form bhakti differs from the canonical Bhakti 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.
The Register of False Forms
False form 1: bakti
Origin: the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds.
Violation: rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write.
The Contested Forms
No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Bhakti. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.
The Convention's Own History
IAST — the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration — was settled in 1912 at the International Congress of Orientalists in Athens, but its logic is far older: Sanskrit grammar (Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī, fourth century BCE) is the most precise phonological system the ancient world produced, and it distinguishes retroflex from dental consonants as carriers of meaning. The underdots of IAST (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ, ṛ) exist because Sanskrit treats those as different letters, not flavors of one letter. The macrons mark long vowels that are, again, phonemically distinct. A romanization that flattens them does not simplify Sanskrit; it misspells it.
What the Address Bar Allows
IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.
That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.
Where the Name Stood First
Bhakti’s monuments are the great temple-towns it animated — Śrīraṅgam, Kanchipuram, Pandharpur — and the palm-leaf hymnals of the Prabandham. The modern ISKCON temples of a hundred cities are its newest layer. The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.
The Verdict
The register rules for Bhakti, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. bhakti carries the name freely — it differs only in display, and the register says so without reservation. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /bhakti/ enforces it.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, bakti first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 4 cited sources — Bhagavadgītā 9.26 (the leaf and the flower), Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (the Āḻvār hymns), Bhāgavata Purāṇa 10 (the gopī cycle).
The Register Continues
Entry 92 of 597 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: Bhaiṣajyaguru (read it) · next entry: Bhūdevī (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.