Quote
Originally posted by: Athrun Zala
Quote
Originally posted by: SixthAngel
Wandering's post says it all.
Honestly, "Nintendo" is a strange enough name and yet somehow everyone here loves it.
heh, but Nintendo is a japanese phrase 
IIRC, it was something like "leave luck to Heaven"....or something else, I'm not sure (since everyone seems to translate it differently)
I've also heard it translated as "leave luck to Heaven" as well, but is it a direct translation? As if, if someone Japanese were to tell me to leave luck to Heaven he would say to me, "Jon, Nintendo." (Heck, if Nintendo is actually a verb, then, I'd Nintendo any day!)
I've always wondered if phrases like that really are literally like they say, or if the Japanese (and other languages) have ways of meaning something without saying it directly, like how some English-speaking people say "ASAP" as if it were a word or spell out "FYI" instead of saying the individual words.
Like to us, playing Street Fighter has Ryu going around shouting "Hadoken" (or "Hadou-ken") as he throws his fireball...it's Japanese, and to most people, sounds exotic, and therefore is mysterious, magical and/or powerful. But to a Japanese person, isn't he just going around shouting "Wave Motion Strike"? How uninteresting would it be if you threw a fireball and said that, or even something like "Fireball!"? (It's like in Psychonauts when the guy in Lungfishopolis, meant to be a Japanese giant-monster battle parody, shouts "Hard-to-avoid-AREA-ATTACK!" and "Overly-intricate-COMBINATION!")
Okay, anyway, back on topic...Nintendo means "leave luck to Heaven". But I thought "Wii" had no meaning, and might actually be hard to pronounce in Japanese itself. I could be wrong. Wouldn't it be strange if Nintendo of Japan really did decide on a name that they couldn't pronounce? How would they come to that conclusion?