The register rules: Mèngpó

Evidence dossier 159 — Mèngpó. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Mèngpó
• Original script: 孟婆
• 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. 159 of 287

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 孟婆, on the evidence Chinese folk religion and Chinese folklore set down. On the evidence, it means "'Old Lady Meng' (孟婆), the goddess who brews the tea of forgetfulness". The canonical transliteration is Mèngpó.

Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. e → è (Grave: falling (4th) tone); o → ó (Stress mark (acute/tone)). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.

Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form mengpo 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: mengpo may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — e → è, o → ó — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Mengpo. 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 (è→e, ó→o) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Exhibit 5 — the physical record. A folk goddess has no canonical temple archive, but her cosmology has monuments: the Fengdu ghost city on the Yangtze — China's "capital of the underworld" — preserves the Nàihé Bridge in stone, crossed by pilgrims and tourists for centuries, with its three arches for the virtuous, the ordinary, and the damned. Ming-Qing underworld scroll-paintings and the woodblock illustrations of the Jade Record (Yùlì) show her at her station, ladle in hand, among the ten courts' bureaucrats.

Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. "Mèngpó's soup" (孟婆汤) is a living idiom for oblivion — offered ruefully at partings and breakups across the Chinese internet. Her imagery saturates East Asian popular culture: the Nàihé Bridge scene is a fixture of afterlife drama from opera to anime-adjacent fantasy.

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 Mèngpó: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form mengpo 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 /sites/mengpo/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Mengpo first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: e → è, o → ó; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Chinese folk religion, Chinese folklore, Teiser.

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: Médousa (read it) · next entry: Mictlāntēcutli (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.