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In the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, one of the monsters is a snake/man hybrid named "yuan-ti." The earliest appearance of this name is in Dwellers of the Forbidden City (1981), in which the name supposedly translates to "demon men." The name is gibberish that sounds vaguely of Chinese origin (and the monsters are sometimes depicted in clothing/arms/architecture with a Chinese-influenced aesthetic), perhaps a combination of the syllables yuan or you an plus ti or di.

Is there any possible way that a Chinese phrase approximating that could translate into an appropriate name for said monster? I know virtually nothing about Chinese besides what little I read online. I looked through Chinese dictionaries and the best I could come up with was 妖蜿者 yāo wān zhě, which is not a real phrase but approximates the apparent pronunciation and meaning of the monster's name... if filtered through game of telephone, I guess?

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  • 水巷孑蠻 got a check for presenting a thing it could be claimed to mean but, fwiw, it's almost certainly not actually what was actually meant. It's far more likely Zeb Cook was looking at charts like this that include various 元帝s ("Primal Thearch/Emperor") transcribed as Yuan Ti. The only thing on the record, though, is him saying it was a Red Nails homage.
    – lly
    Dec 17, 2022 at 19:09
  • Like the space and Pan Lung (蟠龍) imply, Mr Cook was using Legge or nonstandard Wade. "Playing fair", he was already breaking btwn characters. The available pinyin would be yuan + di / ti (not you + an or juan). Personally, I like the callback to Fuxi/Nüwa involved in taking it to mean 元/原体 (both yuántǐ & both meaning "those with the original body"). It also makes for a nice contrast with the base English names, which go from the mostly human ironic "purebloods" to the mostly transformed "abominations". In their own language, they'd then be praising the transformed.
    – lly
    Dec 17, 2022 at 19:34
  • W/r/t your original question, I think you misread the module. It doesn't say yuan ti means "demon-man" in its own tongue (endonym). It says "The chief and the shaman met with your party. In answer to your questions, they told of the yuan ti, or demon-men, and their hateful minions, the tasloi." It's the nearby chief and shaman who are calling them demon-men in their own language (exonym). You could choose to take it the other way, but in that case 淵體 (yuāntǐ, "abyssals") is far more badass than the currently checked answer.
    – lly
    Dec 17, 2022 at 19:43

5 Answers 5

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How about "淵體" (yūan tǐ), or "abyssal entity?" they speak abyssal, don't they?

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  • In the original module, they had their own language but it's abyssal now, yeah. Good option.
    – lly
    Dec 17, 2022 at 19:45
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imo, "yuan-ti" is a transliteration of chinese, using older scheme of romanisation. the characters represented are "軟體" (a pliable body), quite a good description of "snake-related-monster".

the "華英萬字典", printed in 1907,

enter image description here

had the entry of "軟" (juan3, jwan)

https://archive.org/stream/chineseenglishdi00pole#page/339/mode/1up

and, 體 (ti3)

https://archive.org/stream/chineseenglishdi00pole#page/386/mode/1up

it's not far away from "juan" to "yuan" :)

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  • That makes a lot of sense as a possible etymology. Very good!
    – Anonymous
    Sep 7, 2018 at 10:52
  • It's one thing to say it's an option and an entirely different (and wrong) one to say those are the intended characters, esp. relying on a nonstandard transcription of the wrong sound for a poetic meaning.
    – lly
    Dec 17, 2022 at 18:25
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Although yuan-ti does indeed sound Chinese, I don't believe that it corresponds to actual Chinese words which mean demon men or snake men. Chinese versions of DnD (not really official) just translates yuan-ti to 蛇人 (shé rén), which literally means snake people and sounds nothing like yuan-ti.

See this Sina blog.

This Zhihu question asks "Why is 蛇人 called yuan-ti in English?" for which the most popular answer says that "it's not a Chinese-made game", implying that it's non-Chinese gibberish.

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    It could be derived from the idiom 敬鬼神而远之 "to respect Gods and demons from a distance", whose last two hanzi (yuǎnzhī) sound loosely similar to the monster's name, but I suspect I am grasping at straws. In all likelihood the name was chosen based on what sounded cool.
    – Anonymous
    Sep 5, 2018 at 17:52
  • @Anonymous that's a good speculation! Unfortunately, we may never know the true answer, and it may not even by from Chinese at all; if I'm not mistaken, the creator has already passed away?
    – dROOOze
    Sep 6, 2018 at 2:53
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When I first saw an image of yuan-ti, I first thought of FuXi and NuWa, who were gods that were the ancestors of humans/ created humans in their image in ancient Chinese mythology. Depending on the version, they had human upper body and a snake lower body or a human head and snake body. This fits right into two types of yuan-ti. Further more, in mandarin, Yuan ti can be 原体 which means original body. Maybe you could have it as their cult’s intention that they were mixing with serpents to try and return to/emulate the image of their god? I think this would really fit pretty well with the lore.

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  • 元体 also works for more or less the same meaning, based on the rough dictionary translation involved.
    – lly
    Dec 17, 2022 at 18:29
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Actually even us call them yuan-ti 蛇人 since we don't have a proper meaning for yuan-ti

I would say 软体 makes sense to me tho, even if it's something else I believe is something about body(ti=体)

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