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It's portmanteau word (watashi x ashiato) - the pun only makes sense in Japanese.


No it doesn't make sense in Japanese, at least not in the way you parsed it. た and あ are two different characters.


Japanese has puns based on syllables that rhyme, like any other language.


I'm honestly curious. Can you elaborate?


Sure, the word here is presumably meant to be a portmanteau of "watashi" (私 I, me) plus "ashiato" (足跡 footprint). The ~ato suffix refers to the remains or evidence of something no longer present (e.g. the site where a castle used to be), so the word could also be read as "watashi" (me) + "ato" (evidence left behind).

Either way, basically it's a pun. Not the world's most amazing pun, but it's not gibberish like several commenters have suggested.


I don't think anybody's called it out and out gibberish, just awkward and unnatural because The reading watashi for 私 is rarely if ever used in compounds.

If I was asked to invent the word I'd read the same characters as shiseki (私跡), or go with something like 自跡 jiseki "self-tracks". Although even that sounds more like "ruin of self" than what the author is trying to convey.


Hmm, I don't agree at all on the reading - for an ad-hoc coinage, ~跡 is realistically always going to be ~ato. Like if you jokingly referred to a paw print as 犬跡, saying inuato would be clear to any listener, and saying kenseki definitely wouldn't.

But more to the point, the person I originally replied suggested that the coinage in TFA just used Japanese to sound exotic, so that's what I was replying to. It may or not be great wordplay, but it's certainly Japanese wordplay.


Thank you! It was bothering me as well. I speak very little Japanese and was honestly curious. Maybe that was part of the point?




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