The Authentic Orthography
Trickery, Fishing, Fire, Islands · Trickster hero (from Proto-Polynesian *maaui)
Why māui.com is the correct form
Māui
The name in its original Polynesian form. The original script is preserved in scholarly transliteration systems.
MAUI
Stripped of its identity, the name was reduced to plain Latin letters. The original orthography — stress, length, breathing — was erased by systems that only understand A-Z.
Māui
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
māui.com → xn--mui-1oa.com
The non-ASCII characters in Māui are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Māui.
How maui becomes Māui
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | m | → | M | Same | Same |
| 02 | a | → | ā | Length | Macron: long /aː/ |
| 03 | u | → | u | Same | Same |
| 04 | i | → | i | Same | Same |
Why Māui is classified as Tier-1 Macron-Preserving
The Polynesian original Māui contains both stress AND at least one long vowel. However, there is only one historically valid Unicode restoration. The ASCII fallback is modern English, not ancient canonical. This is the full scholarly orthography — a single-tier Tier-1 name.
See how Māui behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
maui
→
Māui