Yánluó — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

Evidence dossier 284 — Yánluó. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Yánluó
• Original script: 閻羅王
• 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. 284 of 287

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 閻羅王, as Rigveda and Chinese Buddhist canon preserve it. On the evidence, it means "'King Yan' (閻羅, from Yama), the judge of the dead". The canonical transliteration is Yánluó.

Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. a → á (Stress mark (acute/tone)); o → ó (Stress mark (acute/tone)). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.

Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form yanluo 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: yanluo may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → á, o → ó — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

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

Exhibit 5 — the physical record. The Ten Kings paintings — sets of hanging scrolls showing each court — survive from the Ningbo workshops of the 12th–13th centuries (the finest sets in Nara and the Metropolitan Museum), with Yánluó's tribunal at their dramatic centre. Fengdu ghost city's temples stage the full bureaucratic underworld in statuary. Dunhuang documents preserve the Sūtra of the Ten Kings, the charter-text of the whole system, copied in tens of thousands for the dead's benefit.

Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. "Meeting Yánluó" (见阎罗) remains the everyday Chinese idiom for dying; "Yánwáng ye" names any pitiless authority. Japanese Enma anchors a thousand festivals and anime (Jigoku Shōjo's Enma Ai made him a household name to a new century).

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 Yánluó: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form yanluo 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/yanluo/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Yanluo first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: a → á, o → ó; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Rigveda, Chinese Buddhist canon, Teiser.

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: Yamunā (read it) · next entry: Yīnyáng (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.