Ninlil: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Ninlil, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Ninlil to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is 𒀭𒊩𒌆𒆤, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Ninlil.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'nin-LIL' — stress the second syllable and let the name end with a light, breathy lilt, like wind passing through reeds. 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 ninlil differs from the canonical Ninlil 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. The Unicode form Ninlil is a baseline restoration: standard Assyriology writes the name without diacritics, and the canonical PuniCodex form preserves that plain spelling while asserting proper-name status. In Akkadian and Assyrian sources Ninlil was identified with Mullissu (also spelled Mulliltu), the consort of the national god Aššur.
And it never stopped working. Ninlil survives in Assyriological scholarship and in the modern recovery of Sumerian religion through ETCSL and the great lexical projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is less famous in popular culture than her daughter Ištar or her consort Enlil, yet her role as wind-queen and mother of lunar and netherworld powers makes her essential to any coherent picture of the Mesopotamian pantheon.
The Convention's Own History
Cuneiform writes a consonant inventory English does not have: š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ mark sibilants and stops that Akkadian and Sumerian distinguished and meaning depends on — the difference between 'sun' and 'son' is exactly one ṣ. Assyriological transliteration (the sign lists of Borger and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) settled those marks over the last century and a half, and the register keeps them because dropping them merges gods, cities, and concepts that the tablets keep apart.
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
Ninlil is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form ninlil 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 Ninlil stands at /ninlil/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — ETCSL, Black & Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness.
The Register Continues
The register holds 542 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: Ninigi (read it) · next entry: Ninurta (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.