In chapter 186 of Aa, Megami-sama! which was published in the April 2004 [1] edition of Afternoon, Welsper finally gives his servant demon a name. The name is written in a word bubble that follows a somewhat unusual format, so what follows is my best guess at a translation of that name, aided along the way by the help and feedback of others.

The servant demon's name is written two different ways, in both a) regular-sized Japanese characters and b) small katakana characters written alongside the Japanese, which do not match up with the reading of the Japanese characters, as they normally would. I call this writing method "false furigana." It's been used before in manga like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, for the names of special attacks moves and for the names of Clow Cards, respectively. As an example, you can look at this scan from the Sailor Moon manga. Sailor Saturn is saying "Death Reborn Revolution," which is the reading of the "false furigana" (the katakana characters) written in tiny letters along the side. The actual reading of the kanji characters used in that word bubble, shi sekai henkaku ("death world change," not actually grammatical Japanese) is related to the meaning of the "false furigana," but actually doesn't matter. The kanji appear for stylistic purposes only; the REAL name of Sailor Saturn's attack is written out in that "false furigana."

The same thing is true of our servant demon's name. Unfortunately, I'm stranded at a Japanese university right now, and will not have access to a scanner for the next three months, so I can't scan the world bubble in question. I can, however, type out what it says. So here's what's written out in that word bubble, in regular-sized Japanese characters:

The reading of the above is aokiyari no suzumebachi. Ao is "blue," yari is "spear" or "lance," and suzumebachi means "wasp." I originally wanted to assume that in this case, yari was meant to refer to the stinger of a wasp, and not a literal spear or lance. But the other people who helped me out with this translation seem to have voted down the idea, so for now I'll stick to a literal interpretation of the word. And admittedly, there is a separate word for the stinger of a wasp in Japanese, which would be dokubari. But I wanted to assume that Mr. Fujishima was being poetic, and not literal. Especially since in English, the technical term for a wasp's stinger is a "lancet," which is just cool in the way that it resembles "lance" already. But anyway, a good translation of the above phrase might be:

But that's not the servant demon's real name.

The servant demon's real name is written out in that "false furigana" that appears as tiny letters alongside the Japanese characters. The "false furigana" is written as follows:

Katakana letters are usually used to approximate the sounds of words from a foreign language, a language other than Japanese. Since the servant angels in the Aa, Megami-sama! manga are all named in English, their names are always written out as katakana. So, too, are the names of the Goddesses, which originally come from Norwegian. But what sort of language is the above supposed to be, and what does it actually say? Now that's where the head-scratching comes in.

The katakana letters written above, when read out loud, sound like:

The * divides separate words. It's important to note that that any "R" could also be written as "L," so we could also be looking at "Bu la u e n * La n tsu e" as well. We won't know for sure until later.

To make a long story short, here's a brief history of the research and guesswork that has led to our conclusion below.

1) My initial guess was that the top line was supposed to be Latin. Of course, I know absolutely nothing about Latin, so I asked my friend Meiousei (who has studied Latin) for help. She told me that di was not an article in Latin, so the phrase might actually be Italian. In both Latin and Italian, vespa means "wasp" and dea means "goddess." Vespa is, incidentally, also the name of a famous brand of motorcycles. So I checked some online dictionaries, and it turns out that di is indeed one way to state the article "the" in Italian. So my first guess for the first line was that it said di vespa dea in Italian. Translated into English, that would be "the wasp goddess."

2) I didn't know what to do with the second line, however. I did a Google search on , and only came up with Burauen, the name of a town on Leyte island in the Philippines, where a famous WWII air battle was fought. I also did a Google search on , and only found what looked like a Japanese mailing list archive about some video game, where was mentioned in a post about some special move or something, which I couldn't understand.

3) Then I thought that the second line might be trying to spell out the English words "Brown Lancet," however, several things bothered me about that. First, according to several dictionaries that I checked, the English word "lancet" should be written as (ra n se tto) instead of (ra n tsu e). Second, "Brown Lancet" does not match with the Japanese characters, which mention a blue lance.

4) So, just for kicks, I started wondering what "blue" sounded like in languages other than English. I tried looking it up in Italian, Latin, French... and finally, Norwegian. And guess what? In Norwegian, blå means "blue," and lanse means "lance" or "spear". In Norwegian, according to this site, adjectives in the feminine or masculine case inflect to end in -n. (There are four adjective cases in Norwegian: masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural. I'm going to go out on a limb and blindly guess that lanse is either feminine or masculine, not neuter, and furthermore singular, not plural. None of the online dictionaries that I checked would tell me either way.)

So at this point, my final guess for the servant demon's true name was:

...with me being very unsure about the second line. Translated into English, the servant demon's name could be understood as "the wasp goddess, Blue Lancet."

And those of you who read the original version of this article know that it previously stopped there. However, since publishing the original article on this site, I have received helpful feedback that has pointed to the fact that, well, I was wrong. So, continuing on, after I initially published this article...

5) Eleryth emailed me to suggest that was meant to represent the German words Blauen Lanze, which likewise translate as "blue lance." In my opinion, this fit the sounds of the katakana characters *much* better than my original idea of Norwegian.

6) Almost simultaneously, Meiousei and Andrew Huang suggested that the entire servant demon's name, including the first line, might be Die Wespe der Blauen Lanze, the translation of which would match the Japanese phrase exactly, "the wasp of the blue lance." In my opinion, it naturally makes a lot more sense for the entire phrase to be in the same language, and admittedly, there was no logical precedent for Mr. Fujishima to use Italian in the first place.

I realize that it might be a little bit hard to understand how "de-a" in Japanese could represent the German word der, so I thought I'd cut and paste the explanation that Andrew offered here:

I do feel that 'dea' is an accurate katakana-ization for the particle 'der'. The 'r' sound in German is the harsh voiced fricative located on the soft palate--that is to say, the sound you get when you go 'chhhh' to work up some phlegm to, say, hock up a loogie, while adding vibrations from your vocal chords. (Sorry about the vernacular.) Note that this is not the rolling 'r' common to many Romance languages. Now, this is not a sound native to a number of languages, including American English and Japanese. The closest approximation is then opening the back of the throat, rather than closing it down to initiate the fricative, which sounds much like an 'ah' sound, which does exist in Japanese. Long-winded explanation, I know, but just wanted to make it clear. It's much like how many English words that end in 'r' have their katakana versions replaced with a long version of the vowel that precedes it or gets replaced with an 'a' at the end.

Also, to further shore up the evidence, Timotheus had also emailed me previously, mentioning that Mr. Fujishima had used German before in the games Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile, which he did the character designs for. Additionally, Mr. Fujishima apparently studied German in college. Therefore Mr. Fujishima has a) some familiarity with the German language and b) a precedent for using it in his works before.

So there you have it. Hooray for a team effort! The servant demon's name is:

Which, like the Japanese characters mentioned above, translates as "The Wasp of the Blue Lance."

Thus, that's our best guess at the servant demon's true name. I think that the lesson learned here is that translating katakana-go, especially for someone like me who only knows English and Japanese, is often a complete stab in the dark. I originally didn't even *think* of looking up anything in German, because I had no idea that Mr. Fujishima had used German in his works before. Well, anyway, I guess we won't know for sure what Mr. Fujishima intended the servant demon's name to be until he writes it out in romanji somewhere within the Aa, Megami-sama! manga. (And I already checked Volume 28; it's not in there.) But for now, I think that our guess seems pretty likely. If anybody else has any feedback or alternative suggestions, however, don't hesitate to send them my way please. And much love and thanks is owed to everybody who helped out with this translation, and to Les for posting (and for letting me revise) this article!

[1] Yes, I know it's March when I'm writing this. In Japan, monthly manga magazines tend to be dated one month ahead of the day on which they actually hit the stores.

G2G's Comments

Personally I have little doubt that the translation is accurate. I feel obliged however to point out that the name given in chapter 186 is unusual. The Wasp of the Blue Lance resembles a formal title rather than a true name in the usual "calling name" sense. It is something like calling Gorgeous Rose "The Angel of the Roses" or Holy Bell "The Angel of the Wind." Note that the names of all the other angels are composed of two words (with the exception of Word of Elegance, but then "of" is simply a preposition). In addition, logic dictates that it would be awkward to call the angel with a name that long. If we consider the name given by Welsper as a title, then the angel's "calling name" might be Blue Lance or even Blue Wasp, following the traditional two-name scheme. Hopefully with future chapters this issue will be resolved.

Update June 2007

From Kotetsu: I've been told that the German edition of the manga translates the servant demon's name as "The Wasp of the Blue Lance." We'll still have to wait and see what Dark Horse or Titan is going to do in their English translations, though.

Update August 2008

From Kotetsu: Hooray! Dark Horse translated the servant demon's name as "Die Wespe der Blauen Lanze." VALIDATION!!!