The register rules: Ólympos

Court is in session. In the matter of Ólympos, the register hears the evidence — the attestation, the marks, and the forms that stand accused.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Ólympos
• Original script: Ὄλυμπος
• Pantheon: Greek-location
• Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
• False forms on record: 0
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 188 of 287

The Charge

That the name Ólympos is routinely written in forms that move, drop, or invent its marks — and that each such form teaches the reader a different, lesser name. The register's task is to separate the honest fallback from the outright false.

The Defense of the Canonical Form

The name is attested as Ὄλυμπος, on the evidence Homer, Iliad and Homer, Odyssey set down. On the evidence, it means "Bright, shining mountain". The canonical transliteration is Ólympos.

Every mark is evidence, and every piece of evidence is checkable:

• o → Ó — Acute on omicron: the stress position, as the sources give it.

The Character Witness

The plain form olympos 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: olympos may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — o → Ó — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Mitigating Circumstances

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the tradition’s standard — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Ólympos. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

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.

Registration, Honestly

Three facts govern every domain this project registers. One: IDNA 2008 welcomes the marks — punycode encodes them legally and browsers show them faithfully. Two: welcome is not availability — registrars hold partial inventory, so the ideal form of a name may exist in the protocol yet not in the shop window today. Three: typeability is a separate virtue — a form no one can type on a phone is a form no one will visit, however canonical.

Hence the hierarchy the rulebook enforces: take the most complete form that is both attested and actually registrable, and never accept a wrong mark for the sake of availability. The wrong accent is not a rung on that ladder; it is off the ladder entirely.

The Verdict

So the register finds: Ólympos, canonical; olympos, a sanctioned fallback; the contested forms, recorded with their support; the false forms, ruled against with their violations named. Every line of that finding cites its evidence, and the evidence is open to any reader — the register asks to be checked, not trusted. The temple keeps the canonical form at /sites/olympos/.

The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: o → Ó; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 10 cited sources — Homer, Iliad, Homer, Odyssey, Hesiod, Theogony.

The Register Continues

Entry 188 of 287 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: Olódùmarè (read it) · next entry: Oṃ (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.