The canonical register: Eachuisge
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Eachuisge, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Eachuisge to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Eachuisge — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: eKH-ooshkya — stress the first syllable, let the ch rasp as in 'loch', and run the second word tight: the whole compound is one breath, horse and water together. 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 eachuisge differs from the canonical Eachuisge 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.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. The each-uisge is the Highland head of a family that runs the length of the Celtic coasts and beyond. His closest cousin is the Lowland Scots kelpie, which haunts rivers rather than lochs and is generally the milder power — drowning without devouring; the two are kindred, not cognate, for the words are unrelated.
And it never stopped working. The each-uisge entered print through the great Victorian field collections — Campbell of Islay's Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–62) and John Gregorson Campbell's Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900) — and it never left. Katharine Briggs's Encyclopedia of Fairies fixed its modern profile as the fiercest of the British water-horses, and MacKillop's Dictionary of Celtic Mythology carried it into the standard Celtic reference shelf.
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.
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
Eachuisge is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form eachuisge shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. 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 Eachuisge stands at /sites/eachuisge/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Campbell, John Gregorson, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900) — the primary Highland field record of the each-uisge: the adhesive back, the liver ashore, the handsome stranger, the red-hot iron, Campbell of Islay, J. F., Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 4 vols. (1860–62) — the great foundational collection of Gaelic oral narrative, Carmichael, Alexander, Carmina Gadelica (1900–71) — Gaelic charms, hymns, and invocations from the same Highland world.
The Register Continues
Entry 104 of 397 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: Ēa (read it) · next entry: Ecne (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.