“Ninte calichniye no domashita, Agelmar Dai Shan,” Moiraine replied formally, but with a note in her voice that said they were old friends. “Your welcome warms me, Lord Agelmar.”
“Kodome calichniye ga ni Aes Sedai hei. Here is always a welcome for Aes Sedai.” He turned to Loial. “You are far from the stedding, Ogier, but you honor Fal Dara. Always glory to the Builders. Kiserai ti Wansho hei.”
With Tor.com’s new “Reading the Wheel of Time” series working its way through the Eye of the World, it seems like now would be a good time for a refresher on how the Old Tongue works in Randland. If you haven’t read The Wheel of Time, there might be spoilers below. Go read the books now, maybe! I’ll still be here in a year. (For clarity’s sake: There’s a weak spoiler for book nine, a strong spoiler from seven, and definite spoilers for the first three books).
A refresher won’t take long, as the Old Tongue is surprisingly simple. Here’s how Robert Jordan describes it: “The actual words are based on many words. I have used Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and for a hint of the familiar, I used a little Gaelic, too. Because fantasy languages always have Gaelic in them. That’s just the way it goes. But I deliberately made the grammar and structure complicated.” Want more clarity on the grammar? Ok. “[The] grammar and syntax are a blending of English, German, and Chinese with some influence from a set of African languages read about long ago, and all but the oddities of structure long since forgotten.”
It is around this point that it should be clear I was pulling your leg: The Old Tongue is not simple. It’s a mishmash of a dozen different languages, thrown together into a Trolloc’s cauldron and stirred with a lot of artistic license. For the majority of fantasy readers, this is OK. Throw in some more apostrophes. Add a few z’s, maybe some capital letters in the middle of the word (HIja’, I’m looking at you, Klingons). We’ll muddle through.
But there’s a small percentage of us who want more: Those of us who try and learn Quenyan, those who translate Facebook into our favorite conlang, and those of us who are curious why Ninte calichniye no domashita, Agelmar Dai Shan translates as Japanese for “I am glad I came up with you” on Google Translate.
What can we make of the Old Tongue? Not much. We can say it sounds pretty, and we can learn by rote some of the grammar rules and intricacies that Robert Jordan invented for it. Without a large lexicon, we won’t be able to speak it on its own. There is a large dictionary in The Wheel of Time Companion which you could use to bootstrap your efforts, but there’s still only around a thousand words, and a lot of them technical. (Mashadar isn’t very useful when you’re trying to get your brother to pass the butter at dinner.) Mostly, we can use our knowledge to make the world seem more real, which was, I believe, the point of creating it in the first place.
On the other hand, if we start pedantically splitting hairs and looking at how the Old Tongue is used in the books, we can also use it to make the world seem less real.
There’s a couple of ways of doing this. The first is to focus exclusively on single words or phrases, and exclaim that they make no sense according to what we know about language. For instance, as others have pointed out, Tia mi aven Moridin isainde vadin (“The grave is no bar to my call”) doesn’t follow the same word order as the other phrases in the Old Tongue that Jordan used earlier. This is probably because Jordan simply hadn’t gotten around to thinking about Old Tongue syntax when he wrote the first book. Jordan loved languages—he purportedly had dozens of dictionaries and grammars in his study. But he was first and foremost a writer of fiction, and sometimes other matters take precedence over figuring out ergative structure in subordinate clauses.

Another example, within a single word, is from Towers of Midnight, where Faile mentions one of her ancestors: “Nikiol Dianatkhah was a drunkard, despite being known as one of our greatest kings.” This is decidedly weird. I couldn’t find any other character or name in all of the books with a <kh> phoneme in their name, and that’s not for lack of trying. They appear in other fantasy languages—who could forget the keen edge of a Dothraki arakh, for instance—but we never see it in the Old Tongue. But here it is in a name. This suggests that the name was either a result of subtle language change in Saldaea, or it was misspelled by the publisher (sorry Tor), or Sanderson couldn’t read Jordan’s handwriting, or Sanderson made it up (which would also be OK, I think, as he did a fantastic job with the series), or it was a one-off and no one could spell Niki’s name throughout his life—or it was simply an example of poor language planning on the part of the author. I’m much more inclined to think it is that last one.
After all, no one is assuming that this series is attempting to precisely reflect reality—we all know it is a work of fiction, written by an author who may be focusing on different aspects as demanded by the story. If no one batted an eye at Tolkien for not having any clear currency in his world, then who are we to judge Robert Jordan, a veteran and a pipe collector, who allows us to see hills in terms of cavalry attacks and who teaches us that pipes with amber bits exist? After all, Jordan is on record as saying that he translated the language for us.
Wait, what?
Yes. All of the time we thought that Rand was speaking English, he was actually speaking some sort of New Tongue. Robert Jordan wasn’t just hearing the muse when he wrote, he was actively translating what she said to him.
Again, who am I to judge? A persnickety, entitled, and small-minded linguist, that’s who. Because frankly, I don’t think that that excuse makes any sense. Let’s go into detail on the reasons why, focusing on regional differences in Randland, how phonology and orthography normally work, and why Robert Jordan’s translation excuse doesn’t cut it.
First, let’s briefly talk about how names are useful when trying to understand languages. Onomastics is the study of the origin and use of proper names. By looking at how people and places are named, you can get a pretty good idea of what the language looked like when spoken by those people or in that area. Normally, this is pretty clear: Paris, Lyon, Marseilles all sound French, which makes sense, because they are French cities. Boston, New Hampshire, and Manchester all sound English, largely because New England was settled by the English; similarly, Connecticut, Nantucket, and Massachusetts are harder for English speakers to pronounce because they aren’t English words at all, they’re Wompanoag.
Take a closer look at those three names: Connecticut, Nantucket, and Massachusetts. The words look and sound different than the other examples. Even from these three examples, you can tell that there’s too many t’s and k’s and n’s for English. This is because the phonology (or sounds) of Wompanoag is different. If we had more text, we could learn more about the language. For now, what we have is a theory that the construction of words (called morphology) is different. Here’s an example of written Wompanoag: Nooshum keskqut quttianatamanack hoowesaouk. Given our few examples, that is right in line with what we’d expect! (For those of you who are curious, that’s the punch line to my joke, “How do you say the Lord’s Prayer in Massachusetts?” which no one, to date, has ever found funny).
So, let’s get take this back to Randland and the Old Tongue. The <kh> example I mentioned above is a good one for understanding what I mean here—the phoneme (bit of sound) ought to tell us about the language that it came from. But it doesn’t, in this case. You’ll most likely not find another word that uses this combination.
Unfortunately, this isn’t exactly an isolated example. My least favourite word in the entire series is cuendillar. Did you know that it is pronounced with a Spanish /j/ sound? Why? Illian isn’t pronounced that way—just cuendillar. And there aren’t any Spaniards in Randland, last I checked. Or take the Niamh Passes mentioned briefly in Fires of Heaven—did you know that is probably pronounced “nee-v”? It’s a Gaelic word for a princess (as I wrote about, here). Jordan had to throw in some Gaelic, but you can’t just throw in a word from a language without bringing along a ton of phonological, orthographical, and (in some cases) syntactic baggage. For instance, domashita sounds exactly like a Japanese verb form, –mashita, which is the past tense, like in 分かりました wakarimashita, “I understood” (it also means “homeowners” in Bulgarian according to Google Translate, but whatever).
The problem is much more systematic, and it’s why I wanted us to focus on names: if everyone all speaks the same language, why are their names so different?
Moiraine Damodred would never be mistaken for an Andoran. Cairhienin all have names like Talmanes Delovinde, Barmanes Nolaisen, or Colavaere Saighan. Andorans from the Two Rivers all have names like Jac al’Seen, Jaim Dawry, or Ren Chandin. With names like Brandelwyn al’Vere, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Bill Ferny, either. Shienarans have names like Easar Togita, Blaeric Negina, Joao, Qi, or Ragan. There are some people with names that could fit in multiple cultures—where is Takima Deraighdin from, for instance?—but on the whole, it’s pretty easy to tell where someone in The Wheel of Time comes from by looking at their name.
You can also tell from their accent, of course. Seanchan people talk slowly, Cairhienin lilt, and Two Rivers people talk noticeably differently than other Andorans. Of course, we don’t hear the accents when reading—we have to have the phrase “and he said this in Tairen accent” included in the text. Sanderson at one point mentions a “rural Illianer accent,” which I wish I could have heard (and which makes you wonder why the accent was less marked in the city than outside of it). Occasionally we have farmers sounding like they came from Appalachia, which says more about the author’s biases than anything else.
We know that the Old Tongue had accents, too. Birgitte tells Mat that “One sentence you’re an Eharoni High Prince and the next a First Lord of Manetheren, accent and idiom perfect.” We also know that there are differences in syntax. Murandians use frozen constructions like “Sure and that’s none of your ways, is it?”, Taraboners love topicalization, and Illianers do be hard to take seriously.
However, none of these differences should explain the naming problem. We’d expect everyone’s names to get closer to modern English, not to get more Cairhienin or Tairen. We do have an inkling that this is happening: The etymology of Far Madding is interesting—we’re told directly that it changed from Aren Deshar to Aren Mador to Far Madding. We know that Cairhien’s proper name is Al’cair’rahienallen, Hill of the Golden Dawn. But these are isolated examples, and on the whole, I would argue that, overall, the evolution toward modern English isn’t happening in Randland names.
Robert Jordan did like talking about the Old Tongue during interviews. He consistently says that everyone spoke it in the Age of Legends, and, after the Breaking, there was never enough time for populations to diverge enough to speak their own language. Every thousand years, a disaster would happen that brought everyone together again, and stopped any regionalisation: the Trolloc Wars, and Artur Hawkwing. (And, as Lan muses in New Spring: “And now, close enough to a thousand years after Hawkwing’s empire died, the Aiel came, burning and killing. It had to be a Pattern.” Which raises a whole ton of eschatological questions, linguistics aside.) He also says that conquests did this for the Seanchan, too. In Winter’s Heart, we read that “History fascinated Egeanin, and she had even read translations from the myriad of languages that had existed before the Consolidation began.”
But languages don’t die just because someone conquers your country. That’s often when you start hiring translators. Yes, one language may take over for economic reasons, over centuries—or, in cases where the majority of the population dies off, the native languages may also become extinct (like Wompanoag, which currently has around five native speakers). But there should be remnant or substrate languages all over the place—particularly in the hinterlands, like the small villages south of Shienar where Hardan used to be. Or in the Two Rivers. Or with the Aiel.
Jordan gave another excuse for the lack of language change—printing presses. They’ve have been around since the Breaking, and that froze a lot of the language differences. But I don’t think this is a good enough explanation, and it doesn’t match how languages work, to my knowledge. Literacy is fairly low in Randland. There are only a few books, and there don’t seem to be many schools for farmers. You can’t freeze a language using books effectively, especially if not everyone is reading. You’d also have to have the same presses and books operating in Arad Doman as in Mayene, and, besides The Travels of Jain Farstrider, we don’t have enough information to know if this is true or not. Without public libraries, I suspect it isn’t. Jordan points to Shakespeare a lot—but how many of us can fully grasp every line of Coriolanus without a dictionary handy? Or Beowulf? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written in a variant of English, but if it wasn’t for scholars like Tolkien—a translator—it might not be in wide circulation now.
The Old Tongue is consistently described as a more complex language than what is currently spoken in Randland. That’s actually a bold claim, in Linguistics; only in the past few decades have scientists been able to say definitively that language complexity differs and changes across languages. What I would argue is that the world is not homogenous just because of intervals of high-contact every millennium. According to the linguist Peter Trudgill, languages can become more complex in a few circumstances:
The major complexity-producing social factors include: small size, dense social networks, large amounts of shared information, high stability, and low contact. … [change requires] considerable periods of time in order to develop undisturbed and go to completion. My sociolinguistic-typological point of view is that in large, high-contact, unstable communities with loose social networks, such lengthy periods are less likely to be available.
This makes sense to me, and it’s the argument that Jordan makes—but I don’t see that there is enough contact not to warrant different languages, and I would argue that 1000 years is far too small a timescale. Look at the Germanic branch of languages, alone. A thousand years ago, Anglo-Saxon would have been pretty similar to Old Norse, Dutch, and High German. But I speak a Germanic language, and after spending two years in Germany, I still wouldn’t be able to phrase “Blood and bloody ashes, there are Trollocs running over our fields” in German without some significant amount of effort.
So, there should be more languages, but there aren’t. There are accent and slight grammar differences, but they don’t explain why names are different. Jordan’s arguments for monolingualism are weak—conquests aren’t enough to force monolingualism on everyone, and literacy doesn’t stop the presses of language change, either. Finally, modern English in Randland doesn’t look anything like the Old Tongue because it’s been “translated” for us. We’re sadly left with a world that makes less sense than it did when we started admiring the realism of the Old Tongue.
But—was the Old Tongue translated, too? That’s what Tolkien did. Almost everyone in his books spoke Westron, where we read English. The Rohirrim had their own language, which Tolkien translated into Old English for us to show how it was related to Westron. Robert Jordan never says that he translated the Old Tongue, but there are some subtle hints. For instance, zemai, t’mat, and oosgai look a lot like maize, tomato, and whiskey. The nadra-bush mentioned by Sanderson in Towers of Midnight looks an awful lot like naddre, which is the Old English word for adder. These words are too familiar to their modern descendants to be anything other than progenitors. But could Carai al Caldazar ever turn into “For the Red Eagle!”? I doubt it.
It’s at this point that even the most avid linguaphiles among us are forced to face the truth: Robert Jordan was certainly a keen amateur linguist, but he wasn’t an academic—he was a writer first, and a linguist second. The handwaving excuse of “I translated it” wasn’t meant to be serious, it was meant to stop the reader from digging in and finding inconsistencies. Because, ultimately, they don’t matter. What matters is that we see a world filled with history and wonder, with words of power and words of lore, echoing through the ages. Instead of raising a hand like an arrogant high-schooler, we’re supposed to take up arms at Mat’s battlecries (I know I’ve pumped my fists in glory a few times in his chapters).
It sure is fun to try and find the cracks though, isn’t it?
Richard Littauer is a fantasy author, poet, linguist, and noun phrase. He tweets, reviews books, cooks over philosophy, and runs Word Hoard Press for original work in dead languages, among other things.
In case someone wants to learn a fantasy language, there are two available through Duolingo. They’ve created a course in High Valyrian, and are working on one for Klingon. There are almost a quarter of a million people working on High Valyrian, and the beta for Klingon has attracted approximately 25,600 people. (It’s interesting that none of the languages of Middle Earth are available. Trade mark issues?)
The complete listing of courses is available at https://www.duolingo.com/courses
It’s interesting that there’s linguistic stasis that mirror the technological one. An eternal medieval/renaissance/early modern period is just as much of fantasy trope as one language to rule them all. I suppose you could hand wave it in this case by saying the Pattern encouraged stasis through the Age to make sure the Dragon could seal the Dark One away.
Though the Old Tongue clearly doesn’t meet standards for a true constructed language, there are some pretty fascinating gems buried in the glossary published in the Companion to the Wheel of Time. My favorite: given how deep the ethical and cosmological issues surrounding autonomy v. compulsion run throughout the series, I love that, while we don’t have anything like a functional verb system, the active and passive voices are clearly articulated, even where supposedly simpler issues like tense are not. Also intriguing given the somewhat Berkleyan relationship between thoughts and actual objects that we see in the endgame is the number of words that are said to be used both for the reality of a thing and its mental image (for example, physical pain and the mental anticipation of physical pain).
Definitely not a true constructed language, though. I broke my brain trying to figure out whether it was inflected or used prepositions (because the answer seems to be “both, depending on what sounds good”). Overall I’m quite happy for fantasy authors who aren’t actually linguists to just play around with language rather than actually having to construct one just because Tolkien did. And for what it’s worth, I’m a fan of the frequent non-phonetic pronunciations. That’s a realistic aspect that you rarely see in epic fantasy, and there is a fairly high degree of regional consistency to them (such as the long-vowel -er seen always and only in Saldaea).
Personally I can manage Elizabethan-Jacobean English pretty well, thanks to years of reading it. I can struggle through untranslated Chaucerian English thanks to remembered lessons and sounding out but Beowulf in the original? Forget it. I can’t even get the gist despite knowing what it’s about.
Even Victorian prose can be trying to read. And eighteenth century worse though the language is practically identical literary forms have changed dramatically.
Personally I can manage Elizabethan-Jacobean English pretty well, thanks to years of reading it. I can struggle through untranslated Chaucerian English thanks to remembered lessons and sounding out but Beowulf in the original? Forget it. I can’t even get the gist despite knowing what it’s about.
Even Victorian prose can be trying to read. And eighteenth century worse though the language is practically identical literary forms have changed dramatically.
What percentage of readers would you estimate care about the structure behind a made up language? I think as long as the words don’t jerk you out of the story, then I wager most readers don’t care. I certainly don’t. Heck, I don’t even read them. I just skip over them until the English starts again.
Fun post. Languages and how they change are pretty cool. I’ve often pondered if things like the internet and better mass communication will lead to faster language drift or slow it down. I feel like slang terms are adopted much more readily, but I wonder if there is more inertia against changing things now.
To answer the question posed in the caption:
Of course, we could also point out that this scene didn’t happen this way, either. And where is the light source coming from?
I would say the lantern is providing the light…
What I notice about that picture is the men are wearing warm, practical traveling clothes and the woman a delicate silk gown fit for one’s bower not the wilderness.
@8 Don’t even get me started on what I notice about this picture. Worst Darrell K. Sweet cover ever. Even worse than the notorious Romance Novel Rand on Lord of Chaos.
The English to Old Tongue Dictionary, and its two-way searchable version, lost credibility for me when I noticed the inclusion of Trolloc band names and other words. Trolloc language was probably built off the Old Tongue of their creation’s era, I assume, but it’s a different language!
The dictionary appears to feature a number of words containing “kh.”
“Because fantasy languages always have Gaelic in them. That’s just the way it goes.” Who started that trend?
Literacy is fairly low in Randland. But not Medieval-level low, I’m told. There may be few books or schools for farmers, but our farmer-protagonists can and do read and write.
@10, oddly to our minds for most of history reading and writing were separate skills and one could read without being able to write. By the twelfth century at least there were enough clerics around that anybody who really wanted to learn could find somebody to teach him. But one could get along perfectly well in most walks of life without literacy so few were that interested.
@8 I don’t remember what scene that’s supposed to be but out-of-context I assume the woman is Lanfear/Selene who’d totally wander around in an impractical dress.
Thank you for this article reminding me to be thankful that I didn’t waste even more time finishing all these wretched books.
This was one of the many reasons why I only got through book 7. That’s when I finally decided I simply wasn’t masochistic enough to force myself to read any more of this derivative and deadly written series of books. The badly done languages on top of the impossible geography, implausible history, unrealistic sociology and unlikable “heros” put me in a place where i stopped bothering except to go forward and read the last couple of chapters of the last book which were, much to my horror, even more poorly written than the earlier materials.
@12, good point. Lanfear only cares about the Sexy.
Btw, the name Nikiol Dianatkhah was included by Sanderson purely as a nod to my cousin. Sometimes analysis runs afoul of the writer’s whim.
The OT spoken by the Borderlanders seems to have postpositions like Japanese and sounds like pseudo-Japanese because their culture is influenced by Japanese culture. In other places the OT seems to be based on other languages with different grammar. It’s not only the phonology that is inconsistent. Just mixing too many languages together doesn’t create a language that makes sense.
I’m a German native speaker and also have trouble translating “Blood and bloody ashes, there are Trollocs running over our fields” into German because it uses (pseudo-)English idioms that just don’t work in German. English idioms and puns (like toh – toe) make no sense when the text is supposed to be a translation.
RJ’s languages change too little, but Tolkien has the opposite problem because he ignores the lifetimes of the elves. If the same elves who left Middle Earth later come back there again, why are they suddenly speaking a different language than those who stayed behind and not just a slightly different dialect?
This made my day. Not usually super wise to assume mistakes, misspellings, or errors. Entertaining read nevertheless.
@princessroxana, I didn’t think it was fair either to include Beowulf as anything near what we speak today. Even Sir Gawain is difficult in the original, Chaucer is easier, being more Frenchified than Sir Gawain‘s language. Shakespeare is basically only difficult because the idioms have changed. Also, fun tidbit re: “one could read without being able to write”, I’ve heard something like that is happening in China due to the widespread use of computers and cellphones because they give you suggestions for the appropriate character so all you’d need to do is recognize the one you want and some people would have a hard time if they were asked to write by hand.
@birgit, personally, I can headcanon your Tolkien Elves issue by saying that the Elves who went over the water would have tried to emulate the Valar/Maiar and learned/assimilated their language. But if Tolkien had said anywhere that the Light and Dark Elves wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other afterwards, then yes, I’d agree it wouldn’t make sense.
Blut und blutige Asche, Trollocs rennen über unsere Felder.
Really? Because google translate had no problem.
Just throwing that out there…
Of course you can translate it literally, and I think the translator of the German books did it that way, but it’s still an English idiom that sounds strange in German while it sounds normal in English.
@birgit
I dont really get why “Blood and bloody ashes” should sound stranger in english than “Blut und blutige Asche” in german. The in-world swearing worked for me in both languages (though the decline in quality of the german translation of the Wheel of Time was the final point that made me start reading english books in the original instead of the translation).
An interesting factoid I picked up years ago is that murderously complex grammars are actually the norm. English has a relatively simple grammar because it’s basically a pidgin created by Danish settlers and their Saxon wives. Later modified by Norman soldiers trying to pick up English girls.
I assume that the OT having mashed-up attributes of many real-world languages with a lot of butchery thrown in is easily explained as a result of the turning of the ages. People literally did speak (as in, do speak now) those real-world languages, but over time as the world changed and ages passed, and eventually everything united into the Age of Legends and its magic-based One World Government, all the languages blended into a common patois that didn’t have a sensible grammatic structure or consistent vocabulary but which native speakers were still able to use to communicated perfectly well.
As for the divergent naming conventions in the wake of the Breaking, I kind of assume there’s an element of nationalistic deliberation going in, with different people groups trying to assert a new identity in the aftermath of the collapse of everything they’d known before. Taking for your people a different naming convention than that potentially hostile other tribe of survivors would be a way of building group cohesion and promoting tribal unity in a dangerous world where going it alone would get you killed but trusting outsiders would get your entire family killed.
When are they making this into a TV series or movie. I can’t wait any longer
@1 I think the reason there are no Tolkienian languages on Duolingo is that none of them are complete enough for that. Tolkien worked on Quenya and Sindarin his whole life, but (as with most things he did) he never produced a finished version. There is an enormous corpus of material, but it changed constantly through his life. Someone could certainly go through and construct their own neo-Quenya or neo-Sindarin (as was done for the movies), but it would be just that — their own creative interpretation of Tolkien’s work, not the “real” language he made up. Tolkien was a philologist, interested in how languages evolve over time, so producing a single coherent product wasn’t really his goal. (In contrast to the way Klingon and High Valyrian were deliberately designed as complete languages.)
I want to point out one little mistake in the article.
I am native Bulgarian and I can tell you that such word doesn’t exist in Bulgarian language. What we have in close form is “domashni/a” which is adjective and it means “made in home” ( contrary to “made in manifacture”).
Let the Light keep you safe.
LightOne
@LightOne Huh! Google Translate gave me that. Not surprised. Thanks for pointing that out!
I wonder what kind of impact Aes Sedai and other long lived people like Ogier, or even the Kin would have on the changing language. You would think that everything would have stayed closer to old tongue because of them.
The Ogier have their own language. AS still study the OT, but they don’t seem to use it as a language of study like Latin in our Middle Ages. Even if they did, they isolate themselves from the rest of society. But in other cultures the Wise Ones or Windfinders could slow down language change. That is even more reason why the Aiel should still be speaking a version of the OT. The Sea Folk need to understand the new language to trade, but they could have their own language they speak among themselves. Did the Amayar speak the OT?
Personally, I don’t think Jordan should have to say “I translated it”. This is an assumption that I always have when digging into a fantasy book that doesn’t take place “in the real world”. How can we assume that a strange people from a strange world speak English? Even when the writer makes puns with English, I like to assume that their language simply allows for the same pun without it being English.
Why would it be an issue that “Tia mi aven Moridin isainde vadin,” the inscription on the Horn of Valere, has an irregular word order? This makes perfect sense to me. It’s poetry! That means it can abide by the normal practices of the languages a bit more loosely.
>those of us who are curious why Ninte calichniye no domashita, Agelmar Dai Shan translates as Japanese for “I am glad I came up with you” on Google Translate<
As a professional Japanese-to-English translator, the real question for me is why does Google Translate think “Ninte calichniye no domashita, Agelmar Dai Shan” is Japanese, lol. (It’s also very amusing to see the total hash its attempt at transliterating that into kana and kanji is: “にんて かぃchにいぇ の どました、 あげlまr だい しゃん”)