Tàijí: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
Evidence dossier 245 — Tàijí. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Tàijí
- Original script: 太極
- 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. 245 of 287
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 太極, in the attestation Zhou Dunyi, Taijitu shuo and Laozi, Daodejing give us. On the evidence, it means "Great extreme". The canonical transliteration is Tàijí.
Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. a → à (Stress on a). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.
Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form taichi 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: taichi may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → à — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Taiji. 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 (à→a, í→i) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
Exhibit 5 — the physical record. Tàijí as a named cosmological term is textual rather than archaeological. Its locus classicus is Zhou Dunyi's Taijitu shuo, preserved in Song dynasty editions and woodblock prints. Earlier antecedents appear in Han commentaries on the Yijing and in the Mawangdui silk manuscripts, which transmit variant versions of the Daodejing and Yijing. The distinctive two-tone taijitu diagram itself becomes common only in Song and Ming visual culture, though the yin-yang pairing it encodes is far older.
Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. Taijiquan is now practiced by millions worldwide and was added to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020. Hospitals prescribe it for balance, hypertension, and stress; parks from Beijing to San Francisco fill with slow, synchronized movement at dawn.
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 Tàijí: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form taichi 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/taichi/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Taiji first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: a → à; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Zhou Dunyi, Taijitu shuo, Laozi, Daodejing, Yijing (Book of Changes).
The Register Continues
This is one of 287 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Sūrya (read it) · next entry: Tàishàng (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.