And in last night's writing...

[Bob Schroeck]

You recall correctly, Timote -- that was brought up explicitly in the incomplete Evangelion "Bogosity" story, Zeon Genesis Bogosity:

"Here we have two words that sound the same in Japanese and Shazaarian
respectively. But when we romanize the top one you notice it reads 'Youma'
while the second translates as 'Jouma' but local pronounciation makes them
sound the same. Now this one ..." She tapped the scrawl reading "Jouma",
"... is our race's name for ourselves but due to the nonhuman appearance of
the ... uh first contacters upon arrival in Japan they were referred to as
"Youma" by the indigenous population. They heard this as "Jouma" and assumed
they had been correctly identified. Later on we figured it out but there
didn't seem much point in making an issue of it ..." Particularly, Titanite
thought, considering the demonic creation of our kind and the derivation of
Jouma from "child of darkness" in the original Arcadian. Aloud she continued,
"So youma, jouma, potato, potatoe, let's call the whole thing off. We'll
answer to either and only etymologists bother about the fine points. Besides
with us around youma has fallen out of usage as a derogatory term and
basically come to mean jouma."

Going back one more post...

But maybe some linguistic memory survived, which caused the Roman gods to be named after the planets?

That's something I'm handling as translation. "Jupiter" wasn't called "Jupiter" during the Silver Millennium, but when Luna doesn't make an explicit effort to speak in "Lunarian", that's how it comes out, thanks to a translation spell imposed on her during hibernation. (The spell isn't perfect, btw, as it was based on analyzing the speech of the area in which she landed, and as a hasty hack job done in the last minutes of Serenity's life didn't take into account things like the possibility of multiple languages being spoken in the same small geographic region -- hello, multicultural Minato!. Nor did it completely substitute Japanese phonemes for Lunarian ones, cutting corners by leaving Lunarian phonemes that were "close enough".)

But gosh, [[wikipedia:List of minerals named after people] is a list of plot holes for BSSM, especially season 1. ... Maybe in Sailor Moon you could chalk it up to reincarnation, or similarity to true names or something?

I'm circling around a couple ideas like that, but nothing satisfactory has gelled for me yet.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.