The canonical register: Sūrya
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Sūrya, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Sūrya to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is सूर्य, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Sūrya.
And the marks themselves: u → ū (Macron: long /uː/). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and small lies in references have long consequences.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'SOO-ryuh' — hold the first syllable long and bright, as in 'sue' stretched out; the final 'yuh' is quick. 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 surya 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: surya may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — u → ū — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Surya: it comes from the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself, and it fails because every substitution here (ū→u) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read As for Súrya: it comes from the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums, and it fails because a macron marks length; an acute marks tone — different facts
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Sūrya was one of the few Vedic gods to retain and expand his worship into the medieval and modern periods, perhaps because the sun itself is impossible to demote. He absorbed Persian and Hellenistic solar imagery after the Indo-Greek and Kushan periods, and his iconography shows clear Greco-Roman influence in the boots, tunic, and royal attributes of classical Sūrya images.
And it never stopped working. Sūrya remains central to Hindu daily life. The Gāyatrī mantra, addressed to Savitṛ, is recited by millions at dawn; sūrya namaskāra, the sun salutation, is practiced in yoga classes worldwide.
The Convention's Own History
Long before IAST was formalized in 1912, Sanskrit had Pāṇini — the fourth-century-BCE grammarian whose rules describe the language's sounds with a precision no other ancient tradition matched. That heritage is why the convention is so exact: retroflexes (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) are not accented dentals but separate phonemes with separate meanings; long and short vowels (ā/a, ī/i, ū/u) change words, not just timing. IAST writes those distinctions down with underdots and macrons so that a reader who has never heard Sanskrit can still read it correctly. Dropping the marks is not transliteration at a lower resolution — it is a different, lesser claim.
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
Sūrya is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form surya is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. 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 Sūrya stands at /sites/surya/.
The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Surya first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: u → ū; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Ṛgveda Saṃhitā 1.50, 1.115, 7.63 (Sūrya hymns), Mahābhārata, Karṇa Parvan (birth and death of Karṇa), Rāmāyaṇa, Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa (Sugrīva's alliance with Rāma).
The Register Continues
Entry 244 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: Stýx (read it) · next entry: Tàijí (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.