The Authentic Orthography
Sea, Protection, Seafaring · Mother ancestor
Why māzǔ.com is the correct form
媽祖
The name in its original Chinese characters form. 媽祖 carries the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the source tradition.
MAZU
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.
Māzǔ
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
māzǔ.com → xn--mz-dla95f.com
The non-ASCII characters in Māzǔ are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Māzǔ.
How mazu becomes Māzǔ
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | m | → | M | Same | Same, capitalized |
| 02 | a | → | ā | Length | Long vowel |
| 03 | z | → | z | Same | Same |
| 04 | u | → | ǔ | Special | Special character |
Why Māzǔ is classified as Tier-2 Macron-Preserving
The Ancient original 媽祖 contains only length (macron vowel). This makes it a single-tier Tier-2 name. The Unicode restoration preserves what can be preserved — honoring the single feature that distinguishes it from plain ASCII.
See how Māzǔ behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
mazu
→
Māzǔ