Post by Vio on Oct 20, 2020 12:37:12 GMT -5
Devil Fruit Names
A Guide to Katakana
The name of a Devil Fruit is usually written in Japanese, but all Devil Fruits follow a surprisingly strict naming scheme! Devil Fruit names don’t just consist of two syllables – something which is often a point of confusion for some – but are made of two “katakana”.
What are Katakana?
Katakana aren’t like English syllables, but are quite similar, as you can probably see by the names of many Devil Fruits, such as Luffy’s Gomu Gomu no Mi, or Crocodile’s Suna Suna no Mi. In written Japanese, they appear as very simple characters, with one for each possible combination of consonant and sound – one for every possible sound in Japanese!
Below is a handy chart of each katakana, written in both Japanese and with their English variant below them:
ア
(a)イ
(i)ウ
(u)エ
(e)オ
(o)カ
(ka)キ
(ki)ク
(ku)ケ
(ke)コ
(ko)サ
(sa)シ
(shi)ス
(su)セ
(se)ソ
(so)タ
(ta)チ
(chi)ツ
(tsu)テ
(te)ト
(to)ナ
(na)ニ
(ni)ヌ
(nu)ネ
(ne)ノ
(no)ハ
(ha)ヒ
(hi)フ
(fu)ヘ
(he)ホ
(ho)マ
(ma)ミ
(mi)ム
(mu)メ
(me)モ
(mo)ヤ
(ya)ユ
(yu)ヨ
(yo)ラ
(ra)リ
(ri)ル
(ru)レ
(re)ロ
(ro)バ
(ba)ビ
(bi)ブ
(bu)ベ
(be)ボ
(bo)ダ
(da)ヂ
(di)ヅ
(du)デ
(de)ド
(do)ガ
(ga)ギ
(gi)グ
(gu)ゲ
(ge)ゴ
(go)パ
(pa)ピ
(pi)プ
(pu)ペ
(pe)ポ
(po)ザ
(za)ジ
(zi)ズ
(zu)ゼ
(ze)ゾ
(zo)ワ
(wa)ン
(n)
How does it work?
The process is simple enough – you find an appropriate name for the Devil Fruit, and then find the katakana that correspond to the name! The table below shows a selection of examples from the series.
Gomu ゴム Doru ドル Awa アワ Sui スイ
Almost all Devil Fruits follow this exact formula. Remember that katakana are fixed characters – they won’t change based on what’s before or after them, so the symbols you see here are always relevant, unlike Kanji.
What are the exceptions?
In some cases, Devil Fruit names use a slightly different formula, but these are special cases. As you might see in the table above, not every possible combination is present – there’s no katakana for the “cho” sound or the “sha” sound, for example. There’s also another couple of unique cases, namely in the form of Bartholomew Kuma’s Nikyu Nikyu no Mi, the various iterations of the Ryu Ryu no Mi, and a small selection of others. All of these will be addressed below, because they all share something in common.
These katakana are “extended” sounds. As they don’t have a single character for them, they instead use a diminutive (smaller) version of the second character in order to complete the combination. While these smaller characters usually follow the katakana they extend from, there is one uncommon exception. The below table shows all of these extended sounds used so far in the series, and why they are as they are:
Ryu リュ (ri-yu) Cha チャ (chi-ya) Cho チョ (chi-yo) Sha シャ (shi-ya) Shu シュ (shi-yu) Wo ウォ (u-o) Ju ジュ (zi-yu) Kyu キュ (ki-yu) -tto ット (-t-to)
As you can see, these are almost all combinations of a specific katakana that ends in “i”, which is then followed by a katakana that starts with “y”. This is the exact same reason why Ryū (“Dragon”) is pronounced like “ree-you”. The only exceptions in this list are “wo”, which is a combination of the “u” and “o” sounds – a very unique case – and “tto”, which is a unique example that precedes the katakana – as shown in the case of Batto.
The Final Word…
We don’t require you to actually use katakana for the name of your Devil Fruit, but a Devil Fruit’s Japanese name won’t work if it can’t be made out of katakana. This is an important rule to remember! The other thing to remember is that a full Devil Fruit’s name is the katakana repeated twice, with two additional characters afterwards:
ゴムゴムの実 Gomu Gomu no Mi
The last two characters are the characters for “no Mi”, which basically just means “Fruit of” or “’s Fruit”. All Devil Fruits share these last two characters.
