Every name with 5 letters.

[Char1016]

This is a question. Don't think of anything else.

When I see Pokemon game screenshots in websites or everywhere in Japanese version. Why pokemons have always their name with 5 letters?

This is weird because some pokemons have the same name:

Charmander & Charmeleon >> Charm
Machop & Machoke >> Macho
Kabuto & Kabutops >> Kabut
Magnemite & Magneton >> Magne

This is in Battle Scenes, Pokedex, when you check your team, and even in the Mysterious Dungeon.

Why?

 

[sdp]

well the japanese Pokemon have different names, so they can be longer or shorter, also the japanese 'alphabet' is nothing like ours one of our letters does not equal one of theirs.

 

[Char1016]

Thanks, I understand now.

This can be closed now.

 

[Char1016]

Yeah. 10 I think too.

Feraligatr. Maybe it should have been Feraligator. But the main problem is that character thing.

But it is still confusing me, if their letters aren't equal to ours, why they don't have more? I don't sure know, but it maybe should have more characters. Anyway, it is their [Japanese people] problem...

 

[sdp]

because it is not equal, if you take some classes you can learn more about it, their language is totally different, one symbol can mean different things.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Usually in Japanese, one symbol would equal two of our letters. So their names only really need five charcters.

For example, "Registeel" is "Rejisuchiru" in Japanese, and character-wise, it's "re" "ji" "su" "chi" ru". Five characters, even through it turns out to be 11 letters in our alphabet.

~Chibi~;249;;rukario;

 

[The Organizer]

The japense launguage holds more letters in one of there letters, and so in the japenese versions the limit is five because english words letters use up more space... I think im right, correct me if im wrong.

 

[wobbanut]

How about the full list of pokemon besides magnemite and magneton that begin with just the same three letters?

Mag- magnemite, magneton, magby, magcargo, magmar, magickarp

I've often had to abbreviate the names for convenience, and it's a headache to use up to four or more letters (though I use just the three for magickarp).

 

[-=Darkness of Umbreon=-]

oh so this is why when I wanted to name all of my pokemon into their jap names, venasuar didn't fit.

 

[The Organizer]

No, that's not how it works. Basically it works in the manner of how many letters you have in your alphabet. ASCII only needs 1 byte and surprisingly enough only 128 characters are encoded in ASCII. The Japanese have at least 100 characters alone in the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. Throw in Kanji... you need a lot more. Although Pokemon doesn't use Kanji, it still needs to be thrown in because it's a standard of character encoding. So Japanese use 2 bytes per character, which gives you a total space of about 65536.

Crap lol, disproven, that is honestly how i tought the character system worked...