Nisien — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Nisien, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Nisien to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Nisien — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'NISS-yen' — stress the middle syllable, keep every vowel short, and never let the s soften into a z. 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 nisien differs from the canonical Nisien 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. Nisien has no counterpart anywhere, and the honesty of that fact is part of his record. No Irish figure bears his name or his office: the Irish cycles know war-goddesses and peace-breaking satirists in abundance, but no personified peace-twin, and Sims-Williams's survey of Irish influence on Welsh literature — which finds deep Irish strata in the Second Branch itself, from the giant king who wades the sea to the cauldron of revival — supplies no Irish original for the sons of Euroswydd.
And it never stopped working. Nisien's afterlife is as quiet as his dossier. Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Mabinogion (1838–49) carried the twins into English, and every retelling of Branwen since has kept the paired sentence — it is the one line of the Second Branch that anthologies quote whole.
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.
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
Nisien is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form nisien 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 Nisien stands at /sites/nisien/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 9 cited sources — Branwen ferch Llŷr (the Second Branch of the Mabinogi), trans. Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion (Oxford, 2007) — the paired character note; the mutilation of Matholwch's horses; the war and the cauldron, Williams, Ifor, ed., Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1930) — the standard Welsh text, Guest, Lady Charlotte, trans., The Mabinogion (1838–49) — the first English translation.
The Register Continues
The register holds 397 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: Nirmātā (read it) · next entry: Njǫrðr (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.