Mistakes on Pokemon Sites.

[Dragon]

Serebii always makes their guides before the English version comes out, and doesn't go to edit them after it does.

Kinda annoying, but meh.

I fixed it for you.

 

[Abwayax]

My bad, I meant succeeds.

I opened up a discussion here about it.

No one responded to me on that talk page in 2 days (seems my innate ability to kill threads follows me around the internet ><), so I'm going to make the actual edit now.

 

[ultraviolet]

Why doesn't Serebii ever fix his errors? o.O

 

[Butterfree]

*shrug* I don't think he really cares. :/ He just wants to be the first with everything.

 

[Abwayax]

I pity the fool who still uses serebii.net as a source of information

 

[Yarnchu]

I only go to it for any news, but Bulbapedia is usually better in that catagory too.

 

[Mad MOAI]

Sorry to, er, upset you, Butterfree, but there is no "L" in the Japanese language.

BACK ON TOPIC, there's a website I go to that says Zigzagoon's base attack is 3041, and Honchkrow's is over 5,000, if I remember correctly.

 

[Butterfree]

Sorry to, er, upset you, Butterfree, but there is no "L" in the Japanese language.

v.v Does nobody understand a word I say? Christ, you're the second person I've been trying to explain this to in the past couple of weeks and it seems to be impossible to get through anyone's skull.

The fact there is no L in the Japanese language is precisely the point.

(Well, it is technically inaccurate to say that; the "r" sound in Japanese is actually kind of midway between L and R as we know them, and if a Japanese person says something that sounds like "ra" and you ask them to repeat it, it might as well sound more like "la" when they do. There is just no meaningful difference between the sounds in Japanese. But back to the point.)

The names of Latios and Latias are derived from Latin, not Japanese. Latin has an L. Latin is perfectly capable of just having the syllable "ti" and ending a word in an S.

In order to write these LATIN names, "Latios" and "Latias", in Japanese, the game creators had to approximate them as far as possible using the syllables that exist in Japanese, rendering them as ラティオス and ラティアス.

Those approximations, without accounting for the fact that they are just approximations of words written with the Latin alphabet to begin with, would be transcribed with our alphabet as "Ratiosu" and "Ratiasu". However, because the actual intended names are LATIN, not Japanese, and are written with the Latin alphabet as "Latios" and "Latias", those are the official romanizations of the Japanese names.

If you walked up to an employee of Game Freak, showed him a picture of Latios and asked him to write its Japanese name with our alphabet, he would write "Latios", not "Ratiosu".


Let's take a parallel example if you still don't get it. Japanese uses the ENGLISH word "hamburger" as a loan word. Being an ENGLISH word, it is correctly written with the Latin alphabet, as "hamburger"; however, for the purposes of using it in Japanese, it has to be approximated using syllables that exist in Japanese, as ハンバーガー. Without accounting for the fact that "hamburger" is an English word, originally written with the Latin alphabet, you would transcribe this as "hanbaagaa".

"Hanbaagaa" is just an attempt to write "hamburger" with an alphabet that can't write it properly. If you're writing in the Latin alphabet anyway, and are aware that it's supposed to be "hamburger", why on earth would you insist that the Japanese word for a hamburger is not "hamburger"? Similarly, "Ratiosu" is just an attempt to write "Latios" with an alphabet that can't write it properly, and if one of them is more correct to use, it is "Latios", since that is the official romanization of the name. Japanese Pokémon merchandise sometimes writes Japanese Pokémon names with the Latin alphabet, and then it will write "Ebiwalar" on a Hitmonchan wallpaper, and "Showers" on a Vaporeon figurine, and yes, "Latios" on a Latios plushie.

I don't know how I can possibly make myself clearer than this.

 

[GorMcCobb]

I don't know about mistakes on pokemon sites, but I was watching pokemon. It was the hoen series. For the comersials they did this quiz thing. They showed a silouette of a Seviper and asked "What does this pokemon evolve from?" There I thought it was a trick question. The choices were; Mightiena, Arboc and Nincada... after commercials they said Arboc. That's why I don't watch the pokemon TV show regularly anymore.


Butterfree... coool it. Some people don't know the Japanese language and the nuanses... But I do agree with what you say. I've been taking Japanese since grade 8.

 

[Dragon]

BACK ON TOPIC, there's a website I go to that says Zigzagoon's base attack is 3041, and Honchkrow's is over 5,000, if I remember correctly.

IT'S OVER FIVE THOUSAND!!!!11!!!

Anyways, I remember seeing somewhere that Metapod evolves into Caterpie. There were some other evolution mistakes too...

 

[Yarnchu]

Well, since Butterfree went a little off topic with the whole Japanese/Latin language thing, I thought about something. Kakuna, Nidoran, Nidorina, and Nidorino can all be spelled using Japanese symbols, so I'm guessing they were directly translated, right? What exactly do they mean or where are the names derived from? Just a little curious.

BTW they aren't the only ones, just something I noticed while playing Hey You Pikachu earlier.

 

[Cryssie]

Kakuna is probably just a corruption of the word "cocoon".

That the names of some of the Pokémon in the Nidoran line can be spelt as-is with Japanese syllables may just be a coincidence. Looking around a bit, there are various suggestions as to the origins of the names...

Whoever wrote Nidorino's 'dex page on Gengar and Haunter's Pokémon Dungeon reckons it may have some relation "rhino", what with being a tough-skinned, horned, quadrupedal beastie and all.

Various ideas under the trivia section of Nidoran♂'s page on Bulbapedia include:

• Relation to the English word "needle" (it is the "Poison Pin" Pokémon, after all), bearing in mind the lack of distinction between R and L sounds in Japanese.
• Relation to the Japanese ni ("two") or nido ("two times" or "two degrees") in reference to the two Nidoran evolution lines.
• Relation to some classification of animals, "cnidarian", which apparently are all stinging animals (Wikipedia talks mostly about squishy aquatic animals like jellyfish, though, it seems o.o).

... *Shrug.*

 

[nza]

As far as misreporting Sinnoh IDs over Serebii.net is concerned...

- Girafarig's Sinnoh ID is actually 121, not 153.
- Wooper has no Sinnoh ID given, when its actual ID is 117.
- Quagsire has no Sinnoh ID given, when its actual ID is 118.

That's all that I have noticed...

And as far as the spelling of Deoxys in that crappy Prima guide goes, they actually do spell it "Forme."

They continue with that moniker in their more recent PokéDex for DP, as well.

 

[Yarnchu]

Please read what I said...

I said that the FR/LG guide WAS NOT the Prima guide, but rather the official one.

 

[nza]

I'm quite capable of reading and interpreting the things that I read.

The point is Prima used the moniker Forme in its guides while Nintendo did not. Perhaps, for once, a mistake was made on Nintendo's part and not Prima's. Prima's moniker is given more relevance with the official spelling of "Forme" now known with respect to Origin Forme Giratina and that spelling being the same as that which Prima has been using.

If it comes to pass that the Rotom alts are also officially referred to as "Formes" there should undoubtedly be recognition of the fact that either...
A) Nintendo's guides were wrong and Prima's were right.
B) The spelling of Forme has been changed by GF, Prima is justified and Nintendo's guides were right but are now wrong.
C) There are now two different spellings of Form/e and the spelling used is determined by which generation the alt originated in (unlikely as it is). This makes Nintendo right and Prima wrong under the pretense that a ridiculous spelling rule has been adopted.

EDIT: In addition to all of that pokemon.com's Dex uses "Forme." The entire discussion could be resolved if it were known whether that had always been the spelling used there.

 

[Pig-serpent]

In the Nintendo guide for Emerald, it spells it forme.