I found this very interesting , my friend told me that Yama was the god of death in indian mythogy. It would make more sense than the translation "mountian cat" it would traslate to mean "death cat" and isnt that what he is after all? After all square has used alot of refrences to mythogly in Final Fantasy. so I would not be surprised at all. Also when I looked up the word yama in the japense dictionary it was a totally diffrent symbol than what is used for Lynx's name!
lol ... Well, it's an interesting theory... but it's utterly baseless. "Yamaneko" means just that: "mountain cat." And rather than calling him "mountain lion" or "puma" or "cougar," Square made the English rendition of his name "Lynx," because... I dunno, it sounds like a cool villain's name.
This is why amateurs or those unfamiliar with the Japanese language should use caution when attempting to trace translations. The "symbol" you saw was a kanji character. Kanji derive from the Chinese language, and are used in Japanese intermittently, often replacing nouns or verb stems that would otherwise be written in the native Japanese alphabet. When used (especially in names), Kanji characters are selected for one of two reasons: either the phonetic pronounciation, or the character's meaning. In the case of Lynx, it's possible that the "Yama" character used in the game for the character's name is different from the character for "mountain." Square could have done this in order to give some subtle secondary meaning to his name that differed from the meaning gotten when you simply read it phonetically.
... However. I don't think that's likely, because I don't think that Square has ever allowed players to use Kanji for character names. I could be totally wrong here, of course!! Because I'm not Japanese, and my level of fluency is still well below the level I'd need it to be to play an original untranslated Square game start to finish. But from a conceptual standpoint, it strikes me that it would be highly impractical (especially in the PSOne generation of Square games) to include an available character library during name selection that allowed for use of Kanji characters, simply because you'd end up with thousands of choices.
So, in the end, the "symbol" you saw in the beginning of Yamaneko's name in the Japanese version was either Katakana or Hiragana (likely the former), which are simple alphabetic representations of sounds with no inherent meaning by themselves.
Also: an allusion to "Yama" from Indian mythology would be WAY far afield and highly unlikely; there's nothing else in the context of the game that supports such an allusion. Yes, Lynx uses a scythe, which is the symbol of death -- but so did the Magus, whose name in the Japanese game was Satan, who is more aptly associated with a trident or pitchfork than a scythe.
Okay I'm done, because I really need to poo.
