octoboy
I Crush Everything
From what I looked up, the Japanese term for echidna literally means "needle mole", and looking at the mole morpheme in that word, there doesn't seem to be any connection to the word for mouse. By the looks of it, though, the word for shrew is derived from the word for mouse in Japanese (and it turns out the French for "mouse" is derived from the Latin for "shrew", which itself is derived from the same Greek word from which "hyrax" [i. e. those little creatures which are cousins to the elephant] is derived... not to mention that the weasel genus is called "Mustela", Latin for "little mouse" yeah, it seems that as far as a lot of languages are concerned, all mammals under a foot long are mice).
By the looks of it, the Japanese for pangolin isn't connected to the word for mouse either, but sandshrew and sandslash are literally called "Mouse Pokémon" in Japanese, so it seems that category is just given to any pokémon based on any type of mammal that's deemed too obscure to use as a category.
By the looks of it, the Japanese for pangolin isn't connected to the word for mouse either, but sandshrew and sandslash are literally called "Mouse Pokémon" in Japanese, so it seems that category is just given to any pokémon based on any type of mammal that's deemed too obscure to use as a category.