ChrisReid
Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Delance said:Apprantly "ii" means good in japanese, I read that somewhere.
That's technically true, but it's also not applicable in this case. The word for "it's good" in Japanese would translate into English letters as "ii," however the translation from English-written "Wii" back into Japanese is entirely different. They're not even written in the same character set. In order to get from the "ii" you read about to the "ii" in Wii you'd have to perform some language destruction along the lines of translating from one language into another language into another language and then back into the source language via the Altavista Babelfish.
Delance said:But, if the reasoning behind this name was its supposedly universally easy-to-say pronunaciation, would the japanese company nintendo figure out it was not the case with their own language?
No, that's internet buzz filtering what Nintendo really said. Nintendo said "Wii" is an easy to remember name for people around the world, which it very much is. Companies in Japan use English words and letters all the time. They think it makes their stuff look sharper and more official. The Nintendo logo in Japan is exactly the same as it is here with the word "Nintendo" in a big rounded box. When you buy a GameCube in Japan, it says NINTENDO GAMECUBE on the box and on the machine right there in English. The Japanese Nintendo controllers have A, B, X, Y & Z buttons just like American ones do. So the marketing of the new Nintendo system will be done in English whether the name is Wii or Revolution, and Wii is a much more iconic and easy to remember name for the millions of Japanese consumers that don't actually read English. For that matter, when written and spoken in native Japanese, "Revolution" would have been an even bigger muddle of a translation than "Wii" (d shift on the 're', no 'vo', no 'lu' and the 'tio' in 'tion' would have been pretty garbled - every bit of the word is problematic).
Delance said:Motorola devised a way to address this problem. Since asian nations that are major markets had difficult spelling the "rola" part, they cut it off outright, now calling themselves "moto" for their celular phone line of products.
Bingo! Possibly the *exact* reason that "Revolution" was nixed as the final name.