Hòuyì — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

Evidence dossier 115 — Hòuyì. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Hòuyì
• Original script: 后羿
• Pantheon: Chinese
• Convention: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u
• False forms on record: 1
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 115 of 287

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 后羿, in the attestation Shān Hǎi Jīng (Classic of Mountains and Seas) and Huáinánzǐ give us. On the evidence, it means "The divine archer who shot down nine suns". The canonical transliteration is Hòuyì.

Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. o → ò (Stress on o); i → ì (Stress on i). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.

Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form houyi 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: houyi may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — o → ò, i → ì — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Houyi. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ì→i, ò→o) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Exhibit 5 — the physical record. Hòuyì's deeds are textual before they are pictorial. The earliest witnesses are Warring States literature: the Shān Hǎi Jīng preserves the ten-suns framework and the suns' parentage, the Chǔ Cí poem Tiān Wèn (Heavenly Questions, c. 4th–3rd century BCE) interrogates Yì's shooting of the suns and his tangled fate, and the Mèngzǐ records the Féngméng betrayal. The fullest surviving narrative is the Huáinánzǐ (139 BCE), which sets the archer in Emperor Yáo's reign and catalogs the slain monsters. In Han dynasty art the cycle became a staple of funerary iconography: tomb reliefs and painted stones at sites such as the Wu Liang shrines (Shandong, 2nd century CE) show the archer drawing against crow-bearing suns, while Mawangdui funerary art (168 BCE) depicts the solar crow and the moon's toad-and-hare company that would gather around Cháng'é. Han mirrors and later pictorial stones continued the imagery, fixing the bow, the crows, and the moon as the archer's permanent attributes.

Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. Hòuyì never left the Chinese imagination. The shooting of the suns is among the first myths Chinese children learn, retold in primers, animated films, and television dramas, and the Cháng'é sequel anchors the Mid-Autumn Festival, when families gaze at the moon where the archer's wife is said to dwell.

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: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u. 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 Hòuyì: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form houyi rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. 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 /sites/houyi/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Houyi first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: o → ò, i → ì; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — Shān Hǎi Jīng (Classic of Mountains and Seas), Huáinánzǐ, Chǔ Cí — Tiān Wèn (Heavenly Questions).

The Register Continues

Entry 115 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: Ḥr (read it) · next entry: Ḥꜥpy (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.