The register rules: Ekkeko
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Ekkeko, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Ekkeko to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Ekkeko — 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: say "ekkeko" — two open syllables with a light glottal catch between the double k in the Aymara-influenced pronunciation; stress falls on the penult. 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 ekkeko differs from the canonical Ekkeko 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. Ekeko is a study in colonial layering. His name and image passed into Spanish as Ekeko or Equeco; his consort bears Coya, the title of the Inca empress; and his fair was folded into Catholic time — the January date in La Paz is bound up with the feast of Our Lady of Peace, and priests bless the miniature purchases even as the Church has periodically denounced the whole commerce as idolatry.
And it never stopped working. Ekeko is today a national emblem of Bolivia, printed on lottery tickets, staged in civic pageants, and set on altars in houses that no longer remember the famine legend. The Alasitas fair has travelled with Bolivian migration — to Buenos Aires, Santiago, and the Peruvian highlands, where Puno keeps its own January fair — so the little god now presides over diaspora longing as much as over household luck.
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
Ekkeko is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form ekkeko 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 Ekkeko stands at /ekkeko/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested.
The Register Continues
Entry 142 of 548 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: Eir (read it) · next entry: Ēl (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.