The canonical register: Kǒngzǐ
Evidence dossier 264 — Kǒngzǐ. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Kǒngzǐ
- Original script: 孔子
- Pantheon: Chinese
- Convention: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u
- False forms on record: 1
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 264 of 548
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 孔子, as Sima Qian, Shiji 47, “Hereditary House of Confucius” and Sima Qian, Shiji 63, “Laozi and Han Fei” (the meeting with Laozi) record. On the evidence, it means "Master Kong". The canonical transliteration is Kǒngzǐ.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form kongzi 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: kongzi may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Exhibit 3 — struck from the record: Kongzi. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ǐ→i, ǒ→o) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
Exhibit 4 — the physical record. Qufu is the material anchor: the Temple of Confucius stands on the site of his residence, consecrated by Duke Āi of Lǔ in 478 BCE and rebuilt to its present Ming-era scale; beside it the Kong Mansion housed his descendants until 1949, and the Kong Lin cemetery holds over 100,000 lineage burials with thousands of stelae. Far older than any temple, the Guōdiàn bamboo slips — a Warring States library buried c. 300 BCE at Hubei and excavated in 1993 — preserve pre-imperial versions of texts in his tradition, proving the school was copying and teaching his books within three centuries of his death. And the Wǔ Liáng shrine stone reliefs (Shandong, 151 CE) already show the iconic scene of the young Kǒngzǐ asking Lǎozǐ about the rites: the myth cut in stone within three and a half centuries of the man.
Exhibit 5 — the continuing record. His living monument is Qufu: the Temple of Confucius — consecrated in 478 BCE, the year after his death, when Duke Āi of Lǔ turned his former residence into a shrine — the adjacent Kong Mansion, and the Kong Lin cemetery, together the largest classical building complex in China after the Forbidden City. His bloodline is on record longer than any other on earth: the Kong genealogy counts more than eighty documented generations.
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: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u. 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.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Kǒngzǐ: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form kongzi rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /kongzi/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Kongzi first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Sima Qian, Shiji 47, “Hereditary House of Confucius”, Sima Qian, Shiji 63, “Laozi and Han Fei” (the meeting with Laozi), Analects (Lunyu), esp. 2.4, 3.24, 7.1, 11.9, 11.12, 18.5–6.
The Register Continues
Entry 264 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: Kōbe (read it) · next entry: Kotoshironushi (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.