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Nintendo UK Defends the Wii
GamesIndustry.biz is running a story defending the Wii from across the pond. Nintendo's UK boss David Yarnton has nothing but good words for the new name for the Revolution. From the article: "It's like any new name ... it takes a while to get established. I think that you'll find that in not even six months, in a short period of time, people will accept it; they won't be referring to Revolution or next-generation, it'll just be Wii."
The gaming press is under an NDA that will be lifted at E3. A lot of the gaming press has already played the Wii, they just can't talk about it until E3 (or talk about it that much... a couple of the game press podcasts have been slipping some bits of info out).
I'm living in the Netherlands at the moment, and haven't bothered learning anything but cursory Dutch (and I only learned that to be polite). People speak English regularly, TV is mostly in English, billboards are in English as often as they are in Dutch... all in all, there is no reason for me to learn Dutch unless I want to apply for residency.
Plus, there are so many shared words between the two languages, that there is every chance that a word in English will be the same or similar in Dutch.
you're more likely to hear the phoneme used to describe "A group of us" than "Urine", I'm still baffled about the hysterical reaction to it.
It's how it fits in a sentence. You can't use a posessive adjective with "we". Nor can you use articles. You can't say "a we" or "the we" or "some we".
Its similarity in sound to the first person plural pronoun actually makes the name even worse. It's why English speakers seem so apt to take it as "wee", since its place in relation to other words makes it sound like that.
Look:
"My wii" doesn't sound like "my we", but rather like "my wee", because if you take "wee" in the sense of urine then at least it's a noun that can take a posessive adjective, and if you take it as an adjective meaning "small" then it just sounds like you dropped a word off the end of the sentence, which, while odd, is still less odd than "My we", which is just awful.
This is also a problem when it's the subject of a sentence.
"Wii is the name of Nintendo's new game console"
"We is"? Huh? Wrong verb conjugation. Sounds broken. "Wee is"? Oh, urine is? Or are you saying that Nintendo has chosen a small name for their new console, without telling us what that name is?
THIS NAME BLOWS.
Nintendo must be hiring the same marketting dumbasses as Coke is. "Oh, 'Blak' is pronounced 'Black', of course, except that in preview pics of the bottles we had a pronounciation mark over that 'a' indicating that it should be pronounced long, so it would sound like "Blake", mostly because we though it looked cool. Oh, and because we're total dipshits who somehow managed to get a degree in a field in which communication is vital without ever setting foot in an English class."