Pokemon Pikachu Sound Mp3 Zip
Lili Sysyn
Since I began writing blogs for Language Log around ten years ago, I have never received so many tips on what to write about as I have in response to the furor that has arisen over Nintendo's plan to change the Chinese names for some of the characters in their immensely popular Pokmon (ポケモン < Pokettomonsutā ポケットモンスター ["Pocket Monster"]) game series.
For example, much loved Pikachu (Pikachū ピカチュウ) was originally called Bei2kaat1ciu1 比卡超 in Hong Kong, which is very close to its Japanese name, Pikachu. But now Nintendo wants to get rid of Bei2kaat1ciu1 比卡超 and force the people of Hong Kong to use the Mandarin name Pkǎqiū 皮卡丘. This same policy extends to more than a hundred Pokemon characters, who will be renamed in accordance with Mandarin transcriptions. You can imagine how alien that will sound to Cantonese speakers who have grown up with Pokemon characters having Cantonese names now to lose those intimate appellations in favor of names that have a Mandarin ring to them.
In the current political climate, with Hong Kong under increasing pressure from China to adhere to mainland norms regarding law, censorship, freedom of speech, and, worst of all, language (Mandarin over Cantonese) and script (simplified characters over traditional characters), the people of Hong Kong are acutely sensitive to anything that smacks of further mainlandization. Mandarin written in simplified characters is truly repellant to nearly all people of Hong Kong, who consider the simplified characters pretty much of an abomination (this is what I hear from my friends, colleagues, and students there [not immigrants from the mainland]), and think that, while the many Mandarin topolects (with their reduced phonologies) may be all right for northerners, they sound uncouth to their southern ear that is accustomed to a greater range of tones and a different set of consonants and vowels (1,760 syllables vs. about 1,300 syllables).
As noted above, Pikachu was originally transcribed as Bei2kaat1ciu1 比卡超 in Hong Kong. Now it will be named Pkǎqiū 皮卡丘. While the name Pkǎqiū 皮卡丘 in Mandarin allegedly sounds similar to the global name Pikachu, it is pronounced Pei4kaa1jau1 in Cantonese, which sounds very different.
"Hong Kongers Protest Over New Translation of 'Pikachu'" (WSJ, 2/31/16) Excellent video in which you can hear the relevant pronunciations spoken clearly in Cantonese and Mandarin, and with this whammy of a closing sentence: "I'd rather play the Japanese version of the video game."
The people of Hong Kong are up in arms over these name changes. For Hong Kongers, it's not simply Nintendo's whim to compel Cantonese speakers to adopt a Mandarin name. Rather, they see these changes as an attack on their language and culture.
Pikachu does say ("cry") its own name in the anime series, and as far as I can tell that last syllable always sounds closer to "chew" than "choo". (It's not so obvious when trainers say the name in the English dubs.) Here's an example that made it into the games: =kSponyY0Pk4
More on Chinese names:
A list of Chinese and Cantonese Pokmon names can be seen at _of_Chinese_Pok%C3%A9mon_names . One of the old comments on the talk page says "While the names are used in various official media, Nintendo's website noted that the names are only for reference."
Judging from this letter to Hong Kong fans written by Nintendo (Hong Kong) Ltd. Games, they seem to take the English "Pikachu" as global standard, in which case "Pikachū ピカチュウ" would be the katakana transcription of the English.
What's gone wrong here and what's the easiest edit? Victor uses 'the people of Hong Kong' and 'all people of' in his article. Is the phrase Hong Kongers in use? 'Hong Kong has vowed' would probably mean an official decision by its government.
That usage of "Hong Kong" in the quotation to which you refer also bothered me, and I spent some time modifying it several ways, e.g., "Hong Kong[ers]", but, finding none of them satisfactory, just let the Quartz wording stand on its own. I'm glad that you've called attention to it.
@David and Victor
Is Hong Kong masculine or feminine? Or neither? Or both?
English lacks a suitably ambiguous, ambivalent or neutral pronoun, so the clear solution is to use singular "they" followed by the plural verb.
So, like, Hong Kong have,like, totally vowed to, like, boycott Nintendo!!1!!1!!
This made me think of Doraemon, another Japanese cultural icon famous in China, according to the Cantonese Wikipedia ( -yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%9A%E5%95%A6A%E5%A4%A2) it was written as 多啦A夢, which is the same as the Mainland rendering. Was the Cantonese pronunciation similar enough in this case to not require a name change?
Thank you for sharing with us the hanzi in question. I may be off-base to be annoyed by this, but it did pester me that so many English-language articles should bother addressing the topic (at all) and yet not include the characters.
There have been similar situations (though generally without the political dimension) for a lot of comic book and cartoon characters in a number of European countries, as established local names are abandoned, usually for the original/English names. Often this seems to be motivated by movie adaptations that popularize the English version.
Ellen K: It's a matter of different realizations of /t͡ʃ/. I think that pinyin represents a [ʈ͡ʂ] sound, but the sound represented in English and romaji by ch is more like [t͡ɕ], which corresponds to pinyin . It's true that writing English "chew" and "choo" isn't helpful.
I was trying to point out the difference in vowels between pinyin qiu and chu, but it didn't occur to me that "chew" and "choo" may not have distinct vowel sounds for many English speakers. (I perceive the difference between 丘 and 處 as both a consonant and vowel difference, but in comparison with the Japanese reading I find the difference in vowel sound more noticeable.)
@Spectator: In this case, the issue isn't about removing a language from the game, since this is the first time Chinese has been officially supported in the game series (I haven't seen the specific release, but I assume that both Traditional and Simplified Chinese will be available). In the case of other media such as anime and manga series, the different localizations/translations have been released separately from the original and by local companies, so the issue of availability of that language doesn't really come up.
Mandarin written in simplified characters is truly repellant to nearly all people of Hong Kong, who consider the simplified characters pretty much of an abomination (this is what I hear from my friends, colleagues, and students there [not immigrants from the mainland]), and think that, while the many Mandarin topolects (with their reduced phonologies) may be all right for northerners, they sound uncouth to their southern ear
As a Hong Kong Brit, I find that I perceive simplified characters to be as repellant as American spelling, and American accents have the same effect on me as Mandarin does (i.e. they sounds somewhat annoying and grating), though I would like to think I speak Mandarin better than most HKers and I am perfectly happy to use simplified characters in the appropriate situations (after all they are faster to write).
Judging from the lists, Pokmon names were unified as far back as second-generation; so it's just the first 151 who have different names in the three languages. These 151, however, are the most iconic, so people will naturally reject kanji transcriptions of their favorite monsters when happen to sound all wrong in their language.
(Incidentally, Pokmon fans will smile at Scyther's Chinese name, which is the same in both languages: 飛天螳螂 "Sky-soaring mantis", "Apsara mantis". The joke being that Scyther looks like it can learn to fly, but, infamously, can't.)
I am a Mandarin speaker, and after some consideration, I would still prefer Pkǎqiū 皮卡丘 over Pkǎch 皮卡處. I feel that despite the difference in the vowel quality, it's the consonant quality that sets the tone in this case: the consonant of both "qiū" and "chu" are /tɕ/, with palatalization, whereas the consonant of "ch" is quite far apart: whether the retroflex /tʂ/ for people with a more (Northern) "standard" accent, or the plain alveolar /ts/ for people speaking Taiwanese Mandarin (which would still sound closer to the Japanese "tsu" instead of "chu").
Those who are still proclaiming the superiority of Mandarin Pkǎqiū 皮卡丘 over other transcriptions of Pikachu have ignored the fact that Nintendo wants the English version to be the global standard, not the Japanese katakana transcription of the English.
Well, the Japanese came first (and indeed pikachu is derived from Japanese words; pikapika is the phono-semantic expression for "glittering; sparkly", while -chu is an onomatopoeia for a rat's cry, like English "squeak"). So rather than "katakana transcription of the English", it would be more adequate to talk about "English pronunciation/adaptation of the Japanese name".
I think that's like how seconds are officially defined in terms of the properties of a particular cesium isotope, even though the definition was obviously originally based on the rotation and orbit of the Earth, in that it was derived from divisions of the length of a day. English "Pikachu" was based on the Japanese name, which was a Japanese-based portmanteau, but that doesn't stop Nintendo from declaring the English version the standard.
Sure, but again, that must be a break from what Chinese fans got used to in their childhoods because so far the Chinese names, both Mandarin and Cantonese, were derived from the original Japanese release, in sound as well as in meaning, and not from the English translation (as far as I can tell). So if you start tracking the English translation overnight, of course existing fans will dislike the change.
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