On Hebe: a letter to a colleague
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Hebe, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Hebe to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Ἥβη, as Hesiod, Theogony 950–955 and Homer, Iliad 5.904–906; 20.231–235 preserve it. On the evidence, it means "Youth (from ἥβη)". The canonical transliteration is Hebe.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'HEH-beh' — both syllables long and even, the first pitched higher. English 'HEE-bee' is the later, Latinized sound. 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 hebe differs from the canonical Hebe 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. Rome knew her as Juventas, 'Youth', and gave her what Greece had almost withheld: a temple in the Forum Boarium, vowed by C. Licinius Lucullus during the darkest year of the Hannibalic War (218 BCE) and dedicated by M.
And it never stopped working. Juventas vanished with the temples, but Hebe kept her name in three worlds. In art she became a favorite subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters — Rubens, Canova and a hundred lesser hands staged the wedding with Herakles and the cupbearer at the Olympian table.
The Convention's Own History
The marks this register defends were not invented for typesetting. Ancient Greek carried a melodic pitch accent, and the acute and circumflex were added by Alexandrian scholars — Aristophanes of Byzantium, tradition holds — precisely to preserve it when the spoken language began to level. Vowel quantity (the macron's concern) is older still: it changes meter, meaning, and grammar, and the poets of the Theogony depend on it. To drop either class of mark is to drop two millennia of deliberate preservation. The restored-stress convention simply continues the oldest documented project in European scholarship: keeping the sound of Greek alive in its letters.
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
Hebe is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form hebe 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 Hebe stands at /hebe/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Hesiod, Theogony 950–955, Homer, Iliad 5.904–906; 20.231–235, Homer, Odyssey 11.601–604.
The Register Continues
This is one of 548 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Hē (read it) · next entry: Heimdallr (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.