The register rules: Narasiṃha
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Narasiṃha, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Narasiṃha to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The attested form is नरसिंह, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Narasiṃha.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'NARASIMHA' — pronounce the restored form with attention to the preserved diacritics and length. 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 narasimha 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: narasimha may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Narasimha: 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 (ṃ→m) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Narasiṃha appears within the Sanskrit tradition and has influenced later retellings, artistic depictions, and scholarly study. The Unicode restoration preserves the name's distinctive orthography for contemporary use.
And it never stopped working. Narasiṃha continues to appear in scholarship, art, and popular reception as a significant figure of the Sanskrit tradition. Restoring the name in Unicode returns the original marks that ASCII removes.
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
Narasiṃha is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form narasimha 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 Narasiṃha stands at /sites/narasimha/.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Narasimha first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 3 cited sources — Monier-Williams, Bhagavata Purana, Ramayana.
The Register Continues
Entry 241 of 397 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: Nanna (read it) · next entry: Neptūnus (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.