Restoration is not a launch-day act. A lexicon of 966 names across 25 pantheons is a living scholarly instrument, and instruments drift. This week we ran a full orthographic audit of the Greek tradition — and it caught real errors. This is what we found, what we fixed, and the machinery we built so the same class of error can never ship silently again.
The Hybrid Rule
The audit began with a deceptively simple question: is Oedípus the right restoration of Οἰδίπους? It is not. Oedípus is a hybrid — the Latinized spelling Oedipus wearing a Greek accent mark. The strict transliteration is Oidípous, and our own convention demands it: the lexicon already prefers Greek transliteration over Latin everywhere else (Aineías, not Aeneas; Klytaimnḗstra, not Clytemnestra; Sísyphos, not Sisyphus).
The rule is now explicit: never mix Latin spelling with Greek diacritics. Either present the Latin form plainly (as an attested variant — Oedipus, Teucer, Medea are legitimate English forms and remain in the lexicon as such), or transliterate the Greek properly. Six entries violated the hybrid rule: Oidípous, Teûkros, Podaleírios, Iokástē, Kréusa, and Hippólytos. All six are corrected, with the Latin forms preserved as labelled variants.
Wrong Accent Is Worse Than None
The larger catch was a family of accent-position errors — about twenty entries where the acute sat on the wrong syllable of the Greek original. Klytaimnéstra becomes Klytaimnḗstra (Κλυταιμνήστρα carries the tonos on the ή). Megára becomes Mégara (Μέγαρα). Atréus becomes Atreús (Ἀτρεύς). The full list runs from Agauē to Tisiphónē, and every one was re-derived from the accent of the Greek word as printed in the lexica.
Our doctrine has always held that a wrong accent is worse than no accent — a reader who sees no mark simply doesn't know; a reader who sees a wrong mark has been misinformed. The audit made that doctrine operational.
The Mark Matters
A third family used the acute where the Greek carries the circumflex — and the difference is not cosmetic. The circumflex marks a vowel that is both long and stressed, two features in one sign. Îris (Ἶρις), Gêras (Γῆρας), Êthos (Ἦθος), Gnôsis (Γνῶσις), and Thêbai (Θῆβαι) now wear the mark the manuscripts actually carry.
The Machinery Behind the Fix
Corrections without gates are just new drift. Alongside the thirty fixes, the audit shipped permanent machinery:
- A hybrid-spelling auditor (
tools/hybrid-spelling-audit.js) mechanically transliterates every Greek original and diffs it against the restoration, classifying Latinization signatures and accent-position mismatches. It runs in seconds, any time. - A domain-form guard in the flywheel validator: every flagship's owned domain must now match its canonical restoration exactly, or carry a written exception with a reason. This is the gate that caught Mjólnir displayed against the owned
mjǫllnir.com— the dictionary form, Mjǫllnir, is now the restoration. - A pronunciation follow-through: the atlas re-derives every affected IPA with the stress on the corrected syllable, so the spoken form tracks the written correction automatically.
Why This Is the Point
Any project can publish a list of names once. Authority comes from maintenance — from being the reference that notices. A museum that never re-reads its labels is a warehouse. The lexicon's value is that it is watched: by validators, by audits, and by readers who write in to say that's not how you spell Οἰδίπους. They are right, and now the record says so.
Thirty names corrected. Zero corners cut. The restoration continues.