Naomi Joy Todd Etymology

Naomi Joy Todd, the dialect coach and language coordinator for the Wheel of Time TV series, designed and constructed much of the Old Tongue language structure expanded by the show. This page documents the linguistic findings from her interview with the Road to Tar Valon YouTube channel in 2023.

Manetheren

For example, Manetheren is an interesting one. It means "Mountain Home." The word for shield is aethan—you have the Aiel warrior society, the Aethan Dor, the Red Shields. I looked at Manetheren and other Old Tongue words with "man" in them. You've got Manshima which means sword, Manu which means to think, Manive which means to drive, Mandarb which is a blade and the name of Lan's horse. So I thought: let's say that "man" is the Proto-Old Tongue word that means "point"—something pointy. There's a lot of connection in many languages between the idea of pointedness and other ideas. A mountain top would be pointed like a blade. So why does Manetheren sound like a blade? Because they both come from this older word that meant pointy. That's where the mountain word comes from and where the sword word comes from. They're separate words—Manetheren doesn't actually mean "sword shield," it does mean "mountain home"—but that's where it came from.

— Naomi Joy Todd

In summary:

• man is the Proto Old Tongue for "pointed", and also means "mountain" in Age of Legends Old Tongue
• etheren is the word for "home", and is related directly to aethan
• man is directly related to manshima, manive, mandarb, and manu.

Shai, Tan, and Dar

The word Shai'tan is a really interesting one. When I look at the language, other examples of "shai"... Shai also means woman. Shai'tan is the Dark One, Shaidar is dark, Shaiel is "the woman who is dedicated"—that's Tigraine's Aiel name. But shain also means peace. I see that and think: we need more story here. Something that creates these connections. What I'm doing is not going through and saying these words don't mean this—I'm saying, where did these words come from to end up very similar? I look at Shai coming from the word for dedication. You have a sense of that with Tigraine's name—the dedicated woman. What's the old, old, old idea of that? For Tan, I took something a little close to an Old English situation where the word for king had a lot to do with being related—that was culturally what was happening in Anglo-Saxon times. Kin and king are related words. Someone related to you in your tribe would be the next ruler. Kind comes from the word for king and kin—it's basically how you treat people you're related to, as opposed to people outside your tribe. So I look at Tan and think: maybe Tan comes from the Proto-Old Tongue ton, which means to give and receive—to be a regent or king. You give to the people and receive things from your people. So tan is actually the Old Tongue word for sovereign. And tana means "to get." Now I'm looking at Shai'tan and thinking: we've got this idea of dedication and this idea of regency. If we look at the name Shai'tan, what it actually is: the king of the dedicated.

...

I continued with this because I was looking at the word Shaidar when examining "shai." You've got Valdar which is God. Dar means forward. It also means sister. Dareis—Far Dareis Mai, Maidens of the Spear. Darshi means to see. So dar, I say, comes from forward, and that's gonna come from an old word that means far away. It could have been used to mean far in the past or far in the future, then came to mean "propel forward" or "move forward." Shaidar is basically "dedicated to forwardness." The people who wanted to break the world wanted "forward" to mean forward, not forward meaning returning and cycling in a wheel. They wanted to go, to change it—forward.

— Naomi Joy Todd

In summary:

• shai at its root means dedicated in AoL OT, as a more basic/older meaning than "woman"
• Shai'Tan means "king of the dedicated" or leader of the dedicated in AoL OT which was applied to the Dark One as a name
• shaidar in AoL OT means "dedicated (to) forward(ness)", a practical statement of what the ideology of the Shadow actually is
• dar means forwards or forwardness
• tan is AoL OT for "sovereign" or "ruler"

This section has radical implications for the linguistics of the Old Tongue. It explains the existence of so many forms of word for dark and shadow: shaidar, shadar, zamon, doon.

• shaidar refers to the abstract movement or ideology of The Shadow, the Darkfriends, those who aide the Dark One Shai'Tan.
• shadar refers to shadows more abstractly and sometimes physically. Perhaps the association between Shaidar and shadows arose because of the Myrdraal's ability to appear and disappear within the shadows, and the general need to cloak their actions in secrecy.
• zamon is the physical concept of darkness and likely the word that was used for dark as in the absence of physical light prior to the opening of the Bore
• doon is the color black.

Extrapolated Implications

This discussion also implies a possible relation between shain, a word traditionally seen as meaning "peace", and dedication or women. There are two possible explanations that rise naturally:

• Peace was related culturally to women, and women were related culturally to dedication, so a chain of meaning led to the creation of the word shain.
• shain did not originally mean peace, but instead meant "dedicated one(s)" or "dedicated" as a free adjective.

In the second case, we need to examine the origins of the Aiel people. The Aiel originally were called the Da'Shain Aiel, which was broken down to mean "One (people) (to) peace dedicated", where da is used to indicate "one who is" or "people who are", shain indicates peace, and aiel dedicated. However, this introduces an interesting possibility; perhaps the word aiel was in fact the word for peace/peaceful in AoLOT. Then, shain was simply being used for dedicated, entirely consistently with the above usages. So, da'shain aiel would mean literally "people dedicated (to) peace".

If we stopped there this would simply be retconning the meaning of shain. However, it is important to remember that the Old Tongue was not a static language, and it changed significantly in usage between the Age of Legends and the New Era, as we observe when we use terms like "AoLOT" and "New Era Old Tongue". NEOT is a liturgical-like language, in the vein of Latin since the slow decline of the Roman Empire. Used ceremonially and borrowed from, but not spoken as a live language of communication. As the Aiel changed their society and abandoned the Way of the Leaf, they may have adapted their name into a new meaning, choosing to view it as taking up the "dedicated" meaning rather than the "peaceful" part of the meaning. This adds an additional twist of what the meaning of jenn aiel was when the term was created, as it may have been originally saying "truly peaceful" versus "truly dedicated".

Since this fits very well with canon understanding of Aiel society and history, we choose to adopt this latter possibility as our view of what the likely etymological history was for the word shain.

Sai'shi

Todd: Sai'shi is the Old Tongue for the source of the One Power—saidar and saidin. Sai comes from the be verb. And shi is also the ending that you add to make a word mean a hundred—if you've got koye which is one, a hundred would be koye'shi. So I thought about it: before the Breaking, there was much more of a concept of things being multiplicitous, having complications, being accepted—as opposed to being black and white. That's the biggest difference you see after the Breaking. Everyone gets very dogmatic: "It has to be this or that." The Whitecloaks are very dogmatic. Before the Breaking, people were more okay with things being different. There were two sides of Aes Sedai—men and women—as opposed to just women. So the idea is that Sai'shi comes from a root meaning "manyness." The idea that being is where the power comes from. Shi denotes manyness. Since the One Power comes from everything, it's the being or power that comes from everywhere. Translated into the vulgar tongue, it loses some of its meaning, being called "the One Power." That makes sense in the world because they've narrowed their vision—they're trying to survive after the Breaking. That would reflect itself naturally in the way they speak. So they call it the One Power—the one thing. But if you literally translate it into the Old Tongue, it would really be more like "everything's power"—the power that comes from everything.

— Naomi Joy Todd