The canonical register: Poliahu

Evidence dossier 396 — Poliahu. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Poliahu
• Original script: —
• Pantheon: Polynesian
• Convention: vowel-length marking as the language commissions standardize it
• False forms on record: 0
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 396 of 548

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Poliahu — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.

Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form poliahu differs from the canonical Poliahu 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.

Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Mauna Kea's summit preserves one of the most remarkable ritual landscapes in Polynesia. Archaeological surveys (notably Patrick McCoy's work from the 1970s–80s) documented well over a hundred stone shrines (ahu) above 13,000 feet, platforms, burials, and marker cairns clustering around the summit and Lake Waiau — a sacred precinct used for roughly a millennium before Western contact. The mountain's slopes hold the great Keanakākoʻi adze quarry, where Hawaiians knapped summit basalt into tools across many centuries, its workshops marked by vast scatters of flakes and preforms. Lake Waiau itself was a kapu water source, its sediments holding a continuous record of human presence. No image of Poliahu is known — the shrines are her portrait: a mountain-top kept like a heiau, its snow the goddess's own visible temple.

Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Poliahu's cult center was the summit itself: Lake Waiau, still sacred, and the dozens of stone shrines that crown the mountain. Offerings of lei and hoʻokupu continue at the lake in the present day, and her name is taught in Hawaiian-medium schools as part of the island's own natural history.

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: vowel-length marking as the language commissions standardize it. 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.

The Protocol's Position

Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.

The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.

The Verdict

Case closed on Poliahu: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form poliahu is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /poliahu/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Nakuina, Hawaii, Its People, Their Legends (1904), Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (1970), Westervelt, Hawaiian Legends of Volcanoes (1916).

The Register Continues

Entry 396 of 548 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: Plūtō (read it) · next entry: Póntos (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.