Lǎozǐ versus the internet
Court is in session. In the matter of Lǎozǐ, the register hears the evidence — the attestation, the marks, and the forms that stand accused.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Lǎozǐ
- Original script: 老子
- Pantheon: Taoist
- Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 145 of 287
The Charge
That the name Lǎozǐ is routinely written in forms that move, drop, or invent its marks — and that each such form teaches the reader a different, lesser name. The register's task is to separate the honest fallback from the outright false.
The Defense of the Canonical Form
The name is attested as 老子, in the attestation Lǎozǐ, Dàodé Jīng (received text; Mawangdui and Guodian manuscript versions) and Sīmǎ Qiān, Shǐjì, chapter 63 (biography of Lǎozǐ) give us. On the evidence, it means "Old master". The canonical transliteration is Lǎozǐ.
No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form the tradition’s convention demands.
The Character Witness
The plain form laozi 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: laozi 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.
Mitigating Circumstances
No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the tradition’s standard — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Lǎozǐ. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.
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.
Registration, Honestly
Three facts govern every domain this project registers. One: IDNA 2008 welcomes the marks — punycode encodes them legally and browsers show them faithfully. Two: welcome is not availability — registrars hold partial inventory, so the ideal form of a name may exist in the protocol yet not in the shop window today. Three: typeability is a separate virtue — a form no one can type on a phone is a form no one will visit, however canonical.
Hence the hierarchy the rulebook enforces: take the most complete form that is both attested and actually registrable, and never accept a wrong mark for the sake of availability. The wrong accent is not a rung on that ladder; it is off the ladder entirely.
The Verdict
So the register finds: Lǎozǐ, canonical; laozi, a sanctioned fallback; the contested forms, recorded with their support; the false forms, ruled against with their violations named. Every line of that finding cites its evidence, and the evidence is open to any reader — the register asks to be checked, not trusted. The temple keeps the canonical form at /sites/laozi/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Lǎozǐ, Dàodé Jīng (received text; Mawangdui and Guodian manuscript versions), Sīmǎ Qiān, Shǐjì, chapter 63 (biography of Lǎozǐ), Zhuāngzǐ (inner chapters, references to Lǎozǐ).
The Register Continues
This is one of 287 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: Lakṣmī (read it) · next entry: Lētō (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.