EFNIR: Kitty Inkpot Kumquat on the Other Shore

[A Smug Dill]

1 hour ago, LizEF said:

I rather like "Odyssey on Unknown Island"

 

Now that's an official English name that KittyInkpot chose for Season Ⅲ, used consistently in the separate Taobao listings for each ink in that collection, and printed on the paperboard retail packaging for the bottled inks.

 

1 hour ago, LizEF said:

Adventures in language!   Thanks for the explanation.

1 hour ago, yazeh said:

I love these linguistic discussions. 

 

The 水獭与沼泽起源 name is tricky to translate, absent an understanding (which I don't have) of to what the manufacturer is referring or alluding. 水獭 is otter(s), 与 is and, 沼泽 is swamp(s) or marsh(es), and 起源 is source or origin. Modern Chinese has some grammatical forms with associated ambiguities (and, come to think of it, may have been picked up from or influenced by foreign langauages such as English). (As well, it does not make any explicit distinction between the singular, the plural, and the uncountable nouns.) In this case, absent the equivalent of explicit parentheses and implicit precedence of (cf. mathematical) operators — which in this case are the literal and, and the implied of from the placement of source/origin.

It could be either (((otter) (and) (swamp))'s origin), as in back story of the fable/tale linking the two objects, or ((otter) (and) (the source of (the swamp))). Season Ⅶ, for which no official English name is given, is literally Fairytale Town in the Story (or Fairytale Towns in Stories); but I'm unable to find a commonly known fairytale or story featuring both an otter (or otters) and a swamp. I certainly couldn't find one that could reasonably be referred to as Otter Swamp.

 

Going by grammatical structure alone, given that an implied of usually binds (the object immediately before it) more tightly than an explicit and, I'm more inclined to interpret the name as Otter and the Source of the Swamp (cf. The Source of Magic by Piers Anthony, in which the protagonist Bink was sent by the king of Xanth to find the source of magic of the entire land; it could well have been titled Bink and the Source of Magic instead), with a singular Otter being the protagonist, so The Origins of Marshes and Otters with plural otters doesn't quite sit right with me either.

[LizEF]

2 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

Ice pick, or rock pick? 🤣