The register rules: Lada
Evidence dossier 272 — Lada. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Lada
- Original script: —
- Pantheon: Slavic
- Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 272 of 548
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Lada — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form lada differs from the canonical Lada 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.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. No material object can be assigned to Lada, and the catalogue says so plainly: no pre-Christian inscription, figurine, or cult site names her, and the so-called Slavic idols — the Zbruch figure and its kin — depict no identifiable goddess of love. Her 'archaeology' is the archaeology of performance: green-oak branches (zelenika) ritually cut and carried to pasture on Jurjevo, round-dance grounds, and the ritual calendar of Đurđevdan. The written witnesses are manuscripts, not monuments: Długosz's Annales in the Komasius copy (16th century), the 1535 print of Pogrzeb świętej Roksany, and Stryjkowski's Kronika (1582). A goddess whose entire dossier is paper, wax, and song must be honored differently from one with temples — her material record is a living spring.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Lada's cult centers are songs, not ruins: Jurjevo and Đurđevdan round-dances in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia; the Roma Ederlezi, when spring is ritually opened with the green oak; Kupala's fires on St John's Eve in Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine — a sister spring festival whose own antiquity is equally debated. Her name fared better in the dictionary than in the temple: Polish ład 'order, tidiness', Czech lad 'harmony, proportion', and the adjective ladný 'graceful' all descend from the same *ladъ that scholars hear in her name — love as concord made audible.
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.
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 Lada: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form lada is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. 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 /lada/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested.
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: Kyūshū (read it) · next entry: Lahamu (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.