On Math: a letter to a colleague
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Math, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Math to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Math — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: mAATH — a long, open 'ah', held like the a of 'father', closing on the soft voiceless th of English 'thin'. One syllable; the whole weight of the name sits on the length of the vowel and the hush at the end. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form math differs from the canonical Math 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.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for mat: it comes from the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds, and it fails because rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Math is the Welsh reflex of a pan-Celtic institution: the sacral king whose rule is bound by taboo. Irish tradition gives the condition its clearest grammar — the gessi of kings, the network of prohibitions whose slow breaking dooms Conaire Mór in Togail Bruidne Da Derga — and Math's footholder geas is the same machinery in Welsh dress, a kingship valid only while its condition holds.
And it never stopped working. Math's afterlife is quieter than his nephews', but the Fourth Branch carried him far. In the twentieth century the branch was remade twice over: Evangeline Walton's The Virgin and the Swine (1936) retells his story as a tragedy of old religion and new, with the geas and the three animal years as its moral engine, and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain made Math son of Mathonwy the aged High King of Prydain for a generation of young readers — the geas laid aside, the grave authority kept.
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.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Math is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form math shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Math stands at /sites/math/.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, mat first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Mabinogion (Fourth Branch: Math fab Mathonwy), Togail Bruidne Da Derga, Ifor Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi.
The Register Continues
The register holds 397 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: Māra (read it) · next entry: Matholwch (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.