The canonical register: Ọbàtálá
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Ọbàtálá, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Ọbàtálá to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is Ọbàtálá, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Ọbàtálá.
And the marks themselves: a → à (Grave: low tone); a → á (Acute: high tone); a → á (Acute: high tone). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and the whole discipline is the refusal of such lies.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: aw-bah-TAH-LAH — low on 'aw-bah', then high on 'TAH-LAH'. 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 obatala 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: obatala may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → à, a → á, a → á — 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. In Brazilian Candomblé, Ọbatalá became Oxalá, often syncretised with Jesus Christ in his role as the white-robed saviour and with the dove as a symbol of peace. In Cuban Santería he remains Obatalá, father of the white beads, and is sometimes divided into youthful and aged paths (Obatalá Ayáguna and Obatalá Orishánlá).
And it never stopped working. Ọbatalá's influence extends far beyond formal religion. The Yoruba value of ìtẹ̀lọ́rùn — patience, coolness of heart — is modelled on his temperament.
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: modern Yoruba orthography — underdotted vowels and ṣ preserved. 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
Ọbàtálá is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form obatala 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 Ọbàtálá stands at /sites/obatala/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 3 preserved marks verified: a → à, a → á, a → á; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Idowu, Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief, Bascom, Ifa Divination, Abraham, Dictionary of Modern Yoruba.
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: Ọbà (read it) · next entry: Ọṣọọsì (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.