The register rules: Ēa
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Ēa, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Ēa to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is 𒀭𒂍𒀀, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Ēa.
And the marks themselves: e → Ē (Macron: a visible question mark — the length of Ea's first vowel is discussable, not certain). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and references are built of exactly such small truths.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'EH-ah' — two level syllables, with the first vowel held slightly longer to signal the open question of length. 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 ea 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: ea may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — e → Ē — 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. Ea is the Akkadian pronunciation and reinterpretation of the Sumerian Enki. The shift from EN.
And it never stopped working. Ea survives most visibly as a method: the deity who knows secrets and uses them to save rather than destroy. The flood story, transmitted through Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, entered the biblical Noah narrative.
The Convention's Own History
Cuneiform writes a consonant inventory English does not have: š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ mark sibilants and stops that Akkadian and Sumerian distinguished and meaning depends on — the difference between 'sun' and 'son' is exactly one ṣ. Assyriological transliteration (the sign lists of Borger and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) settled those marks over the last century and a half, and the register keeps them because dropping them merges gods, cities, and concepts that the tablets keep apart.
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
Ēa is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form ea 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 Ēa stands at /sites/ea/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: e → Ē; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 12 cited sources — ETCSL, CAD, AHw.
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 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: Durgā (read it) · next entry: Eggþér (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.