Game Over.
RIP.
The man who took Nintendo from a small family business into an international megacorp has copped it, aged 85. Hiroshi Yamauchi died of pneumonia in a Japanese hospital on Thursday morning. Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo in 2002, and left the board in 2005, but remained the largest individual shareholder and was …
I would have thought that unlikely because there is a "Mo" (も) in Japanese, but there is no "D" sound in the language, so anyone translating would be unlikely to use a "D" as it's not really available to them (excepting that they do also make fairly heavy use of Romanji - the English/Western alphabet.)
Incidentally the Japanese word for Monkey is Saru (さる), but you could spell the English word "Monkey" as a direct translation of the English into Japanese as まんき (mo-n-ki).
That said, I know basically next to nothing about Japanese...
Just a slight pedant alert. In Japanese, when they're trying to accommodate a foreign word, they differentiate it by using an alternate phonetic alphabet: katakana (vs. the traditional hiragana you used).
To translate the word "monkey" into katakana would be 「モンキ」, though as you say Japanese has a direct term for monkey and wouldn't need katakana.
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/donkeykong.asp
"Shigeru Miyamoto, the game's inventor and the one person who unquestionably knows the origins of the name he chose, has repeatedly affirmed that he used the word "donkey" to convey a sense of stubbornness and the name "Kong" to invoke the image of a gorilla. "
While it seems most people remember only the home games, the real money in the early years of video games were the arcade games.
There were a stunning breakthrough in arcade amusement. And because they (the machines) were physically bigger and better capitalized, they were able to incorporate more computing power, thus giving us better graphics and action than our poor cousin home consoles.
Alas, those are mostly gone as well.
Didn't Starfox originally come from a British company who were one of the few non-Japanese businesses sub-contracted to make first party titles for the Nintendo? They made the pitch and Nintendo were so amazed that they managed to get actual 3D polygons out the hardware that they brought them in to produce the game.
Indeed, interesting history here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_Games#History
Seems Argonaut commissioned the SuperFX chip because, as impressive as Argonaut's software skills were, even the SNES hardware wasn't up to the task.
[As an aside, while we're talking about add-on chips: Personally I would have preferred Virtua Racing for my MegaDrive, but my parents had already got me the hugely expensive Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition which had huge, for the time, ROM.]