Lētō: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Lētō, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Lētō to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Λητώ, as Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Hesiod, Theogony record. On the evidence, it means "Lady, forgotten one". The canonical transliteration is Lētō.
And the marks themselves: e → ē (Eta: long epsilon); o → ō (Omega: long omicron). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and references are built of exactly such small truths.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'LAY-toh' — hold the first vowel long like 'lay' without the off-glide, and let the final 'oh' carry a gentle rise-and-fall pitch. 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 leto 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: leto may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — e → ē, o → ō — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. The Romans knew Lētō as Latona, and her cult spread through Italy with that of Apollo. In Lycia she was identified with a local mother goddess, Lada, and the Letoon became a centre of syncretic worship.
And it never stopped working. Lētō's most enduring legacy is Delos itself, one of the most important archaeological sites in Greece and a UNESCO World Heritage centre. Her story of persecution and sanctuary also resonates in later narratives of divine mothers and exiled queens.
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
Lētō is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form leto is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. 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 Lētō stands at /sites/leto/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: e → ē, o → ō; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Hesiod, Theogony, Callimachus, Hymn to Delos.
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Lǎozǐ (read it) · next entry: Liwyāṯān (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.