72901
Lately I have been watching a lot of streams and videos of _Persona 5 The
Royal_ , which has only released in Japanese. One character in that game very
frequently exclaims "いよっしゃあ{LLHHHH}", "iyosshaa", which sounded strange enough
to my English-speaking ears that I felt compelled to look it up, just to find
no definition that I could read! It seems to roughly correlate with "Yeah!" or
"Alright!", and does not strike me as terribly formal. If this is dialectal,
the game is set in Tokyo, and in particular the area around Shibuya. I am very
curious as to the precise range of meanings carried by this word or phrase,
and what its origin may be.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-11-04T10:08:51.630
72897
2019-11-04T16:09:40.413
35930
question
meaning etymology colloquial-language
Meaning and etymology of phrase or interjection いよっしゃあ?
When you pronounce や, ゆ, or よ, you’re basically making a smooth transition
from い to another vowel. They sound very much like いあ, いう, and いお. That’s why
いやだ is so readily reduced to やだ in colloquial speech.

Likewise, the い in いよっしゃあ is just an emphatic lengthening of the initial sound
in the exclamation
[よっしゃ](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E3%82%88%E3%81%A3%E3%81%97%E3%82%83-673997).
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-11-04T16:09:40.413
72901
2019-11-04T16:09:40.413
72897
answer