The register rules: Éris

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

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Éris
• Original script: Ἔρις
• Pantheon: Greek
• Convention: the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write
• False forms on record: 2
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 81 of 282

The Charge

That the name Éris 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 Ἔρις, as LSJ and Beekes record. On the evidence, it means "Strife". The canonical transliteration is Éris.

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

• e → É — Acute on e: the stress position, as the sources give it.

The Character Witness

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

Cross-Examination

The witness É́ris

Where it comes from: the English ear — English speakers slam the first syllable of every borrowed name (DEL-fi, MY-cene), so the accent drifts forward online. Why it cannot stand: moves the stress from e (where the Greek puts it) to É — a different word with a different rhythm; the sources stress e and nothing else.

The witness Éris

Where it comes from: the circumflex habit — writers who learned that "the little hat means Greek" and apply it wherever an acute belongs. Why it cannot stand: the source carries an acute (oxeia, a rising tone), not a circumflex (perispomene, a rise-fall): the two marks are different facts about pitch, and only the acute is attested on e.

Mitigating Circumstances

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Éris. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

Why These Marks Exist at All

Greek diacritics are a preservation technology. The acute marks pitch rising; the circumflex marks pitch rising and falling; the macron marks time — how long the vowel is held. The first two were invented by Hellenistic scholars to save the accent as speech flattened; the last matters because Greek meter is built from long and short syllables the way music is built from beats. A transliteration that keeps these is not "decorated" — it is the difference between the name as evidence and the name as guesswork. This register holds to the restored-stress convention because it is the convention that keeps the evidence.

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: Éris, canonical; eris, 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/eris/.

The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, É́ris first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: e → É; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 11 cited sources — LSJ, Beekes, Hesiod.

The Register Continues

The register holds 282 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: Érebos (read it) · next entry: Érōs (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.