The canonical register: sjꜣ
The internet spells sjꜣ more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: sjꜣ
- Original script: 𓋴𓂝
- Pantheon: Egyptian
- Convention: Egyptological transliteration — ꜣ, ꜥ, ḥ, ḏ, ṯ as the grammars record them
- False forms on record: 2
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 237 of 287
The Canonical Form
The attested form is 𓋴𓂝, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is sjꜣ.
No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form Egyptological transliteration — ꜣ, ꜥ, ḥ, ḏ, ṯ as the grammars record them demands.
Where the Flattened Form Stands
The plain form sia 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: sia may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
The Register of False Forms
False form 1: sja
Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself.
Violation: every substitution here (ꜣ→a) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
False form 2: sjâ
Origin: the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums.
Violation: the aleph ꜣ is a consonant (a glottal/vocalic reed), not a long vowel â.
The Contested Forms
No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — Egyptological transliteration — ꜣ, ꜥ, ḥ, ḏ, ṯ as the grammars record them — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: sjꜣ. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.
The Convention's Own History
When Champollion read the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s, he recovered a consonantal script — hieroglyphs record consonants and leave vowels to the reader. That single fact explains the whole transliteration apparatus: ꜣ and ꜥ are consonants (the glottal reed and the pharyngeal ayin), and ḥ, ḫ, ḏ, ṯ mark gutturals and emphatics that Egyptian distinguished and English merges. Egyptology settled these marks in the Manuel de Codage so every scholar writes the same name the same way. The register keeps them for the same reason: an Egyptian name without its consonants is not a simpler name — it is a shorter, wronger one.
What the Address Bar Allows
IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.
That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.
Where the Name Stood First
Sia appears in temple reliefs as a member of Ra's solar barque, notably in the Book of Gates and the tomb of Seti I. The Shabaka Stone preserves the Memphite theology in which divine perception animates creation. New Kingdom royal tombs and sarcophagus texts emphasize understanding (sia) as the prerequisite for justified speech before the gods. The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.
The Verdict
The register rules for sjꜣ, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. sia is the sanctioned fallback for systems without marks — a vehicle, never the scholarly primary. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /sites/sia/ enforces it.
The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, sja first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 4 cited sources — Shabaka Stone, Memphite Theology (perception in the heart and tongue of Ptah), Pyramid Texts, Utterance 255 (authority through understanding), Book of the Dead, Spell 17 (Sia in the retinue of Ra).
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 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: Šw (read it) · next entry: Sītā (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.