Re:Japanese Words and Names Sound African. Why?
by thedailymail on Monday June 17, 2024 @07:34AM
(#40704543)
The Pikachu name is also partly derived from the pika, a small rabbit-like mammal native to Asia and North America.
Re:Japanese Words and Names Sound African. Why?
by naniwaduni on Tuesday June 18, 2024 @06:15AM
(#40715937)
The pika is an obscure (yet barely interesting...) rabbit thing with no cultural salience, whose most noted features are its alarm call and lack of visible tail, nor are its names pronounced much like the pika in Pikachu in the languages Japanese has much exchange with. Pikachu is explicitly a rodent (a "mouse" with some squirrel inspirations) designed in the early 90s with none of those features.
This claim seems profoundly unlikely.
The same is probably true for the Japanese word for flag, 旗/hata - it would have been pronounced /pata/ which is suspiciously reminiscent of the onomatopoeia /patapata/, often used for thin pieces of material flapping in the wind.