The register rules: Tūmatauenga

Evidence dossier 262 — Tūmatauenga. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Tūmatauenga
• Original script: —
• Pantheon: Polynesian
• Convention: vowel-length marking as the language commissions standardize it
• False forms on record: 2
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 262 of 287

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Tūmatauenga — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.

Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. u → ū (Macron marks the long vowel). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.

Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form tumatauenga 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: tumatauenga 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.

Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Tumatauenga. 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 (ū→u) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Exhibit 5 — struck from the record: Túmatauenga. Origin: the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums. Grounds: a macron marks length; an acute marks tone — different facts.

Exhibit 6 — the physical record. New Zealand's ridgelines keep his monuments: thousands of pa — terraced, ditched, and palisaded hill-forts — from the classic period, with sites like Maungakiekie (One Tree Hill) among the largest earthworks of the Pacific. The greenstone mere and the carved taiaha of the museum collections (Te Papa's among them) are his regalia; the Auckland War Memorial Museum — itself a cenotaph to the fallen — houses the war-canoes and the martial taonga of his people. The kumara storage-pits beside every pa tie his war-and-garden cycle into the ground itself.

Exhibit 7 — the continuing record. The haka — performed by the All Blacks before every match and by the army at every farewell — is his face in modern life: the widened eyes and out-thrust tongue are the literal mata anga of his name. Ngāti Tūmatauenga, the army's Māori designation, makes him the only ancient god officially patron of a modern state's armed forces.

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: vowel-length marking as the language commissions standardize it. 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 Tūmatauenga: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form tumatauenga 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/tumatauenga/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Tumatauenga first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: u → ū; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Grey, Polynesian Mythology, Tregear, Grey.

The Register Continues

Entry 262 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: Troíā (read it) · next entry: Tvaṣṭṛ (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.