The Spark
Why Do the Gods Live in ASCII?
It started with a domain search. Zeus.com — taken. Apollo.com — taken. Every variant, every permutation, claimed by corporations and parking pages. The gods of Olympus had been evicted from their own names.
But then a thought: what if we don't use the English spellings? What if we use the Greek?
Not the Greek alphabet — that would be zeus.gr and miss the point entirely. But the transliterated Greek, with its pitch accents and macrons preserved. Zeús. Ápollōn. Names that carry the full weight of their originals, encoded in Unicode, readable by any modern browser, yet invisible to the ASCII squatters who have claimed the Latin versions.
The Philosophy
Linguistic Justice in the Digital Age
The erasure of diacritics is not a technical limitation. It is a cultural amnesia. When Ἀπόλλων becomes "Apollo," something irreplaceable is lost: the pitch accent that rises like a musical note, the long vowels that stretch across syllables like held breath.
Greek is not English with funny marks. It is a language where accent means pitch — a rising tone that changes meaning, that carries emotion, that makes a name a summons rather than a label.
PÚNYCODEX exists to say: the marks matter. The macron on the ē in Hēra is not decoration. It is the difference between a short syllable and a long one, between a name whispered and a name proclaimed.
The System
The Tier Doctrine
As the collection grew, a pattern emerged. Some Greek names have both stress and length in their originals. Some have only one. This became the Tier System — a philological classification that determines how completely each name can be restored.
Tier 1 names are the fullest restorations. Tier 2 names preserve what remains. The Dual-Tier Four — Apollo, Hades, Hekate, Nike — are exceptional: they have multiple historically valid spellings, and we own them all.
The Vision
What Comes Next
Twenty temples built. Four more awaiting consecration. The Pantheon is not complete — it never will be. New archetypes wait in the wings: Egyptian, Hindu, Mesopotamian. Every culture has names that have been flattened by ASCII.
The mission is simple: restore what was erased. One domain. One diacritic. One archetype at a time.