Evidence dossier: Yama
Evidence dossier 583 — Yama. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Yama
- Original script: यम
- Pantheon: Sanskrit
- Convention: IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 583 of 597
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is यम, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Yama.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form yama differs from the canonical Yama 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.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. No Yama temples in the Vedic sphere — the ancestor-cult needed no image. But his buffalo and noose carved into the doorposts of death-temples across Nepal and Bali, and the Enma iconography of Japanese temples from Kamakura onward, mark the reach of his cult east.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Yama is the ancestor of every Asian judge-of-the-dead: Enma-ō in Japan, Yŏmna in Korea, Yanluo in China — a continuous iconography from the Veda to manga. The word ‘Yamī’ survives in the river Yamunā; and the maxim ‘even Yama’s writ runs by karma’ structures the moral imagination of half the world’s population.
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.
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 Yama: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form yama is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. 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 /yama/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Rigveda 10.10 (the twin dialogue), Rigveda 10.14 (the path to Yama), Atharvaveda 18 (funerary hymns).
The Register Continues
The register holds 597 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: Yām (read it) · next entry: Yammu (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.