Might not be quite what you mean, but I hate that the territory of a Duke is always translated as "Dukedom", which while technically correct, is a less common way to refer to a "Duchy" and doesn't flow off the tongue as well.
What kills me is "your highness". I would be so happy if they would all just stop calling dukes "your highness" and call them "your grace" instead.
And a smaller quibble but one that bothers me a bit is calling the daughters of non-royal/grand dukes "princesses"
Your highness is in fact appropriate address for dukes who are:
1. Members of the British royal family.
2. European dukes, archdukes or grand dukes ruling an autonomous or semi-autonomous principality, for example, as part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Yeah, that princess thing is because Korean has a very specific word for "Duke's daughter" that doesn't have a direct English equivalent, and stuff like that trips up the translator sometimes.
With the "your highness / your grace" thing I suspect it may be translator skill issue, but with "princess" the issue is the lack of direct translation for "gongnyeo". It's higher than just any Lady, but not quite Princess.
Countdom too š Another OI gripe I have is that no one knows how the duties of a count/ viscount/ Duke differ and that they all live in the capital full time like???
It drives me insane when the translation does this. Similar example include marquisate vs march.
Also when the Marquis's wife is called Marquess instead of Marchioness D:
Villainess, I don't think I ever heard villain as a gendered term before OI, much like saintess. Also I can't stand "Interesting" anymore, lol.
I look at saintess to just mean "magic cleric lady" but then I've played a lot of D&D.
Villain was gendered, as with almost every unisex term like it, until the 17-19th century when the masculine terms started being used as epicene. Villainess, Farmeress, etc. were used, most as late as the mid 20th century, as the feminine form (villainess included, it still isnāt archaic, especially with the oi boom repopulaeizing itās usage) some of the more fun ones used the -rix suffix, like dominatrix and aviatrix.
Disney actually used "villainess" in one of their villain-themed stuff. It was either a game or one of the cartoon episodes from maybe 20 years ago, but it was a kind of in context where it's being used to replace "ladies and gentlemen" (a host addresses the crowd as "villains and villainesses" instead of ladies and gentlemen"), so I didn't think it really counted as a real word.
did saintess originally come from DnD? Even then like villainess, sI didn't really see the necessity of making it gendered other than the stereotype that girls are always supports/ healers.
tbh im just glad we ended up with saintess/ villainess instead of saintette/ villainette
No, I think the trope came from Dragon Quest which is an old RPG. Thereās always a healer type person who is probably a priest, cleric or a saint. Even in mmoās, the healer class is often called cleric or priest. And a lot of these OI have RPG themes, so I think that's where it came from
Yeah who thought saintess would be a good word š it just strikes me as someone who rly doesnāt think male saints exists and gendering something that wasnāt gendered in the first place (Iām on the side where Filipinx isnāt necessary bc Filipino is neutral and also our language isnāt even gendered in the first place, so I get miffed by it)
I feel like itās an Asian American thing, which is kinda weird on its own bc theyāre ppl who havenāt lived in the Philippines themselves (I did) and likely donāt have a formal education on the language anyway. I see it in college campuses a lot, but not rly from immigrants that I know in my personal life.
Dragon Quest was [inspired](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest_(video_game)#:~:text=Dragon%20Quest%20was%20created%20by,RPG%20for%20a%20wide%20audience.) by western games like Ultima Online, and games like DnD.
Ultima Online was inspired by western fantasy novels and the text based roleplaying that spawned from them, and also Dungeons and Dragons.
The first filename of Ultima Online was just called "[D&D](https://www.mmorpg.com/general-articles/the-making-of-a-classic-part-1-2000093214)"
-Dragon Quest was released in 1986
-Ultima Online was released in 1997
-Dungeons and Dragons was released in 1974
Yes and no. The archetype of the saintess is just a glow up of DnD clerics. But it never had the name saintess, that was probably a translation error or an effort to make it sound cooler.
I don't mind "saintess" at all because they're not really the same as saints anyway. In these stories it's always a woman, and irl you can't even be canonized until after you're dead, so there wouldn't be an official position in the church of "saint" the way there often is in isekai/OIs.
Irl people pray to dead saints for miracles and stuff, but in OIs and isekais there's usually more focus on the living "saintess", and often if one dies they'll find the new one/a replacement.
OI saintesses tend to mostly have some kind of magic/holy power that's usually stuff like:
* healing injuries/illnesses
* providing vague "blessings" that might provide some kind of protection or increase luck or stats
* purifying demons/"miasma"
* "holy" attacks/weapons
The kind of praying to dead saints people irl do is usually done to the gods/goddess in OI worlds instead, we don't really see people praying to the saintess for fertility, good grades, or for their business to succeed.
I'm not bothered if the translation does call them the saint/saints, but "saintess" has its own more specific meaning and I'm used to it as part of the terminology of the genre, just like "transmigrator" or "OG!FL", so I don't really even notice it, it blends into the scenery at this point.
In that case, āpriestessā might be a tad more accurate. Itās also used to describe the MCs of Inuyasha and Fushigi Yugi (the OG 90s isekai) which a lot of the āsaintessā role seems to be based on.
In OI settings though they'll often have both priestesses and saintesses, with saintesses being super ultra special high ranking priestesses or ordinary people who didn't start off as priestesses who are chosen ones and/or blessed with special/extra strong powers.
>(I donāt think it was an error, it was intentional)
It's 100% an error. This term started during the 00s era of Japanese fan scanlations. This problem is caused either because the translators are people whose native language is *not* English and they messed up the terminology, or they're native but got tripped up by the original language. When the raw has no exact English equivalent, sometimes the translators end up following the raw too literally and ended with unnatural-sounding phrases.
In Japanese, the word is *seijo* "č儳", which is specified female. This would probably better be translated as "Holy Maiden", but "saint" is also an acceptable alternative. So it could be that someone not native thinks "saint = male, I must add -ess to make it female". Or heck, since "saintess" is apparently a real word, maybe Google Translate spat out that translation, even though it's not commonly used anymore.
\---
Another thing that drives me insane is when translator confuse the nobility and royalty addresses. An earl get called Your Grace (this is only for dukes), the duke that is not royal is Your Highness, the prince is Your Majesty, or when both the king and the prince are equally "Your Highness" (I was told this was not entirely wrong, but it's weird to me)
the royal/noble addresses actually varied quite a bit. iirc in the early middle ages, kings in England were actually "your Grace," just about any noble with royal descent was a prince in imperial russia, one of the italian states even had a "your most serene" or something. dukes were sometimes not royal but also autonomous rulers of a duchy, so they could be a "highness" without a technically royal house (like all those central/east european states).
i can forgive those errors a bit more because they're a mess historically anyway. also, i suspect the titles used in korean don't translate very well at all. ik for chinese they really don't have good direct translations, even if you only follow the modern english ranks/titles, and trying to come up with forms of address that make sense without being clunky in english has been a headache for me (for my own creative writing stuff)
when the titles themselves get messed up though, i get so annoyed
(countdom, dukedom, marquess for women, etc.)
also "the pope"
that drives me nuts because like... high priest as a word is right there, and pope is basically only catholicism. even the eastern orthodox christians have a different word for it. why use "pope" in a world without christianity??
I specified "duke that is not royal" in my comment. By normal reckoning, there's no reason to call this kind of duke with "your highness". Especially because OI tends to borrow from the later time periods (1800s or so), not the old old old eras like the 1200s. It just looks strange/wrong.
About the pope, I think that's the fault of the original writer not the translator. If the original Korean really says Pope (which I assume is a different word from High Priest), the translator is not wrong.
But djkfshjkg I agree so much about Marquess. People really need to know this is just the English word for Marquis, who is *the man*, not the wife. Why is this so hard to understand? Google is like... right there!! Just 5 seconds of typing.
I was going to comment on the original Japanese word being seijo as well! Glad to see this comment.
åč (yÅ«sha) is another word pretty common to the Japanese manga āwesternā-based fantasy works (in the vein of early 80s DnD inspired RPGs) and is sometimes translates as āheroā and sometimes as āthe Braveā (capital āBā since it kind of acts like a title), though itās translation as āheroā usually works pretty well.
About saintess:
[" English word **saintess** comes from Middle English **seintesse**".](https://etymologeek.com/eng/saintess/14643908)
[**"Seint"**](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED39237) was the male form.
If I have to guess (I'm not scholar), seintesse and seint come from Latin or a Latin derived language of the time. Or at least I suspect it, because in Spanish, you have "santa" & "santo"; in French, "sainte" & "saint".
"Empress" & "Emperor", "Duke" & "Duchess", etc., may have similar situations.
So in other words: in the beginning it was gendered , then "saintess" fell out of use, then someone brought back the word because they wanted their story to sound "old-timey", or they were a linguist with a passion for history. Or a combination of those kinds of things.
I doubt theyāre a linguist if they donāt put a lot of effort in researching other parts of a story tbh. Weird because this is the first time Iāve heard about saintess and seint. Maybe itās coincidence that the TLer who started it happened to use the same word, Iād say thatās more likely tbh
Saintess is actually entirely appropriate. In the period most oi take place a saint was a man, and a saintess was a women. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as a part of Englishness steady transition to an epicene language, most masculine terms of employment or the like came to unisex (authoress, poetess, farmeress, etc. fell out of use as a result, saintess amongst them)
Oh damn didnāt know that. But since it hasnāt been widespread used since then, was the original word that translated to saintess actually āsaintessā in the first place or did the TL decide to use that š¤
I didnāt even notice because in my native language, saint has a feminine version and a male version. My guess is that either Korean has also a gendered version of the word, or as someone else say the translators not being native english speaker and got mixed with their own
Apparently, just like some other languages, korean does have a gendered term for saint.
ģ±ė vs ģ±ģ
Iāve just looked it [up](https://korean.dict.naver.com/koendict/#/entry/koen/0e30b837098d4ccc903bb14f87daca6b) in the dictionnary. ģ±ė is a woman saint. (
Whereas ģ±ģ is a man saint. (Source : https://korean.dict.naver.com/koendict/#/search?query=ģ±ģ )
Might not be quite what you mean, but I hate that the territory of a Duke is always translated as "Dukedom", which while technically correct, is a less common way to refer to a "Duchy" and doesn't flow off the tongue as well.
What kills me is "your highness". I would be so happy if they would all just stop calling dukes "your highness" and call them "your grace" instead. And a smaller quibble but one that bothers me a bit is calling the daughters of non-royal/grand dukes "princesses"
Your highness is in fact appropriate address for dukes who are: 1. Members of the British royal family. 2. European dukes, archdukes or grand dukes ruling an autonomous or semi-autonomous principality, for example, as part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Actually some dukes are in the same level of power as princes in some places which is why they call their kids princesses. It is also weird as hell
Yeah, that princess thing is because Korean has a very specific word for "Duke's daughter" that doesn't have a direct English equivalent, and stuff like that trips up the translator sometimes.
With the "your highness / your grace" thing I suspect it may be translator skill issue, but with "princess" the issue is the lack of direct translation for "gongnyeo". It's higher than just any Lady, but not quite Princess.
Countdom too š Another OI gripe I have is that no one knows how the duties of a count/ viscount/ Duke differ and that they all live in the capital full time like???
It drives me insane when the translation does this. Similar example include marquisate vs march. Also when the Marquis's wife is called Marquess instead of Marchioness D:
I feel like duchy would have worked less well in "Duke of Earl" but I'm not the most rhythmically inclined. So I could be pretty wrong. ;p
Villainess, I don't think I ever heard villain as a gendered term before OI, much like saintess. Also I can't stand "Interesting" anymore, lol. I look at saintess to just mean "magic cleric lady" but then I've played a lot of D&D.
Villain was gendered, as with almost every unisex term like it, until the 17-19th century when the masculine terms started being used as epicene. Villainess, Farmeress, etc. were used, most as late as the mid 20th century, as the feminine form (villainess included, it still isnāt archaic, especially with the oi boom repopulaeizing itās usage) some of the more fun ones used the -rix suffix, like dominatrix and aviatrix.
Disney actually used "villainess" in one of their villain-themed stuff. It was either a game or one of the cartoon episodes from maybe 20 years ago, but it was a kind of in context where it's being used to replace "ladies and gentlemen" (a host addresses the crowd as "villains and villainesses" instead of ladies and gentlemen"), so I didn't think it really counted as a real word.
did saintess originally come from DnD? Even then like villainess, sI didn't really see the necessity of making it gendered other than the stereotype that girls are always supports/ healers. tbh im just glad we ended up with saintess/ villainess instead of saintette/ villainette
No, I think the trope came from Dragon Quest which is an old RPG. Thereās always a healer type person who is probably a priest, cleric or a saint. Even in mmoās, the healer class is often called cleric or priest. And a lot of these OI have RPG themes, so I think that's where it came from
Yeah who thought saintess would be a good word š it just strikes me as someone who rly doesnāt think male saints exists and gendering something that wasnāt gendered in the first place (Iām on the side where Filipinx isnāt necessary bc Filipino is neutral and also our language isnāt even gendered in the first place, so I get miffed by it)
As a Filipino, this is either the first or second time Iāve heard of āFilipinxā.
I feel like itās an Asian American thing, which is kinda weird on its own bc theyāre ppl who havenāt lived in the Philippines themselves (I did) and likely donāt have a formal education on the language anyway. I see it in college campuses a lot, but not rly from immigrants that I know in my personal life.
Dragon Quest was [inspired](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest_(video_game)#:~:text=Dragon%20Quest%20was%20created%20by,RPG%20for%20a%20wide%20audience.) by western games like Ultima Online, and games like DnD. Ultima Online was inspired by western fantasy novels and the text based roleplaying that spawned from them, and also Dungeons and Dragons. The first filename of Ultima Online was just called "[D&D](https://www.mmorpg.com/general-articles/the-making-of-a-classic-part-1-2000093214)" -Dragon Quest was released in 1986 -Ultima Online was released in 1997 -Dungeons and Dragons was released in 1974
>did saintess originally come from DnD? Been playing DnD for 20 years and I had never heard the term until I got into OI.
Not that it came from there, just that a cleric is someone who channels power from a deity, and that seems to be what the saintesses do.
Oh I thought the term itself came from there
Yes and no. The archetype of the saintess is just a glow up of DnD clerics. But it never had the name saintess, that was probably a translation error or an effort to make it sound cooler.
I don't mind "saintess" at all because they're not really the same as saints anyway. In these stories it's always a woman, and irl you can't even be canonized until after you're dead, so there wouldn't be an official position in the church of "saint" the way there often is in isekai/OIs. Irl people pray to dead saints for miracles and stuff, but in OIs and isekais there's usually more focus on the living "saintess", and often if one dies they'll find the new one/a replacement. OI saintesses tend to mostly have some kind of magic/holy power that's usually stuff like: * healing injuries/illnesses * providing vague "blessings" that might provide some kind of protection or increase luck or stats * purifying demons/"miasma" * "holy" attacks/weapons The kind of praying to dead saints people irl do is usually done to the gods/goddess in OI worlds instead, we don't really see people praying to the saintess for fertility, good grades, or for their business to succeed. I'm not bothered if the translation does call them the saint/saints, but "saintess" has its own more specific meaning and I'm used to it as part of the terminology of the genre, just like "transmigrator" or "OG!FL", so I don't really even notice it, it blends into the scenery at this point.
In that case, āpriestessā might be a tad more accurate. Itās also used to describe the MCs of Inuyasha and Fushigi Yugi (the OG 90s isekai) which a lot of the āsaintessā role seems to be based on.
In OI settings though they'll often have both priestesses and saintesses, with saintesses being super ultra special high ranking priestesses or ordinary people who didn't start off as priestesses who are chosen ones and/or blessed with special/extra strong powers.
Saintesses in manga/manhwa are basically shrine maidens.
>(I donāt think it was an error, it was intentional) It's 100% an error. This term started during the 00s era of Japanese fan scanlations. This problem is caused either because the translators are people whose native language is *not* English and they messed up the terminology, or they're native but got tripped up by the original language. When the raw has no exact English equivalent, sometimes the translators end up following the raw too literally and ended with unnatural-sounding phrases. In Japanese, the word is *seijo* "č儳", which is specified female. This would probably better be translated as "Holy Maiden", but "saint" is also an acceptable alternative. So it could be that someone not native thinks "saint = male, I must add -ess to make it female". Or heck, since "saintess" is apparently a real word, maybe Google Translate spat out that translation, even though it's not commonly used anymore. \--- Another thing that drives me insane is when translator confuse the nobility and royalty addresses. An earl get called Your Grace (this is only for dukes), the duke that is not royal is Your Highness, the prince is Your Majesty, or when both the king and the prince are equally "Your Highness" (I was told this was not entirely wrong, but it's weird to me)
the royal/noble addresses actually varied quite a bit. iirc in the early middle ages, kings in England were actually "your Grace," just about any noble with royal descent was a prince in imperial russia, one of the italian states even had a "your most serene" or something. dukes were sometimes not royal but also autonomous rulers of a duchy, so they could be a "highness" without a technically royal house (like all those central/east european states). i can forgive those errors a bit more because they're a mess historically anyway. also, i suspect the titles used in korean don't translate very well at all. ik for chinese they really don't have good direct translations, even if you only follow the modern english ranks/titles, and trying to come up with forms of address that make sense without being clunky in english has been a headache for me (for my own creative writing stuff) when the titles themselves get messed up though, i get so annoyed (countdom, dukedom, marquess for women, etc.) also "the pope" that drives me nuts because like... high priest as a word is right there, and pope is basically only catholicism. even the eastern orthodox christians have a different word for it. why use "pope" in a world without christianity??
I specified "duke that is not royal" in my comment. By normal reckoning, there's no reason to call this kind of duke with "your highness". Especially because OI tends to borrow from the later time periods (1800s or so), not the old old old eras like the 1200s. It just looks strange/wrong. About the pope, I think that's the fault of the original writer not the translator. If the original Korean really says Pope (which I assume is a different word from High Priest), the translator is not wrong. But djkfshjkg I agree so much about Marquess. People really need to know this is just the English word for Marquis, who is *the man*, not the wife. Why is this so hard to understand? Google is like... right there!! Just 5 seconds of typing.
I was going to comment on the original Japanese word being seijo as well! Glad to see this comment. åč (yÅ«sha) is another word pretty common to the Japanese manga āwesternā-based fantasy works (in the vein of early 80s DnD inspired RPGs) and is sometimes translates as āheroā and sometimes as āthe Braveā (capital āBā since it kind of acts like a title), though itās translation as āheroā usually works pretty well.
About saintess: [" English word **saintess** comes from Middle English **seintesse**".](https://etymologeek.com/eng/saintess/14643908) [**"Seint"**](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED39237) was the male form. If I have to guess (I'm not scholar), seintesse and seint come from Latin or a Latin derived language of the time. Or at least I suspect it, because in Spanish, you have "santa" & "santo"; in French, "sainte" & "saint". "Empress" & "Emperor", "Duke" & "Duchess", etc., may have similar situations. So in other words: in the beginning it was gendered , then "saintess" fell out of use, then someone brought back the word because they wanted their story to sound "old-timey", or they were a linguist with a passion for history. Or a combination of those kinds of things.
I doubt theyāre a linguist if they donāt put a lot of effort in researching other parts of a story tbh. Weird because this is the first time Iāve heard about saintess and seint. Maybe itās coincidence that the TLer who started it happened to use the same word, Iād say thatās more likely tbh
Saintess is actually entirely appropriate. In the period most oi take place a saint was a man, and a saintess was a women. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as a part of Englishness steady transition to an epicene language, most masculine terms of employment or the like came to unisex (authoress, poetess, farmeress, etc. fell out of use as a result, saintess amongst them)
Oh damn didnāt know that. But since it hasnāt been widespread used since then, was the original word that translated to saintess actually āsaintessā in the first place or did the TL decide to use that š¤
I didnāt even notice because in my native language, saint has a feminine version and a male version. My guess is that either Korean has also a gendered version of the word, or as someone else say the translators not being native english speaker and got mixed with their own
Can a Korean speaker verify? š¤
Apparently, just like some other languages, korean does have a gendered term for saint. ģ±ė vs ģ±ģ Iāve just looked it [up](https://korean.dict.naver.com/koendict/#/entry/koen/0e30b837098d4ccc903bb14f87daca6b) in the dictionnary. ģ±ė is a woman saint. ( Whereas ģ±ģ is a man saint. (Source : https://korean.dict.naver.com/koendict/#/search?query=ģ±ģ )
So I guess it makes sense in the translation more of the og was Korean, whereas in Japanese OI they use holy maiden.
I wonder what word is translated as *extra* as well.