The only relation to real life asians are katanas, blade's armor (more or less) and architecture. We have no idea at all how Akaviri actually looked like.

It's very arguable just how snake-like they were. I had a discussion about this with another forumer Melchior not long ago, and among other things, facts that armors, greaves and boots included, were made based on their armors, and basically every single place known to be built by them included stairs and not a single ramp etc. offers some solid support that they could have had legs, for the starters. Then who knows what else they had in common with humans, but it's known that legends can be hyped in a huge scale so from what we know they might as well be more human like than Argonians are. Hell, if you take "eaten" as "assimilating into culture", their lowest ranking troops might have been the actual, original Akaviri. There is too little material to work on to make any completely assured assumptions.

Might have been me since I mentioned that not long ago.

Lore that should never have been made, and was only added because the developers realized that they culturally and racially screwed the Bretons over by copy-pasting them into a new race and changing the racial abilities to make Imperials, which is the greatest Atrocity to the setting ever committed by the series.

Bretons aren't half-elves. The majority of their elven heritage comes from women being concubines of the Direnni, so they're not going to look like elves. They look like Nedes.