On Nakula: a letter to a colleague
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Nakula, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Nakula to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is नकुल, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Nakula.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: “nuh-KOO-luh” 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 nakula differs from the canonical Nakula 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.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Nakula is the Aśvins’ son in the epic’s divine-accounting, linking the heroic age to the Vedic physician-gods; and in later tradition the twins became the exemplars of brotherly symmetry — the epic’s only perfectly matched pair. The veterinary and medical lore the epic assigns him passed into the practical traditions of horse-culture across the subcontinent.
And it never stopped working. The twins Nakula-Sahadeva are the subcontinent’s byword for matched pairs — in cards, in teams, in twins generally. His name graced South Indian kings (Nakula of the Cōḻa line’s theophorics); and in the epic retellings, his quiet excellence is the standard against which the louder heroes’ fireworks are measured.
The Convention's Own History
Long before IAST was formalized in 1912, Sanskrit had Pāṇini — the fourth-century-BCE grammarian whose rules describe the language's sounds with a precision no other ancient tradition matched. That heritage is why the convention is so exact: retroflexes (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) are not accented dentals but separate phonemes with separate meanings; long and short vowels (ā/a, ī/i, ū/u) change words, not just timing. IAST writes those distinctions down with underdots and macrons so that a reader who has never heard Sanskrit can still read it correctly. Dropping the marks is not transliteration at a lower resolution — it is a different, lesser claim.
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
Nakula is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form nakula shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. 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 Nakula stands at /nakula/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 4 cited sources — Mahābhārata, Ādi Parvan (the twins’ birth), Mahābhārata, Virāṭa Parvan (the incognito year), Mahābhārata, Bhīṣma & Droṇa Parvans (war record).
The Register Continues
Entry 355 of 597 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: Nagoya (read it) · next entry: Namtar (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.