The Golden Orchid
joined May 4, 2021
Oh yes, for those who are curious about the name of the magick that Maoa performed. (magick, NOT magic, it is not the same) The English translation apparently uses Vietnamese, which uses Latin alphabets, so the translation is not quite there.
The scanlation is using Chinese (Mandarin) pinyin.
You cannot really interpret the phrase as two pairs of kanji, or 3 kanjis form together and then one alone, and certainly not all four of them as a term.
There's no hard and fast rule regarding parsing, it's a made up term after all. Certainly I wouldn't treat it as four independent characters when translating this.
Edit: Having been shown the raws for this, it's clearly 誑魂命鬼 (not the other way around, that reading would make zero sense. So that's kuang hun ming gui in Chinese). And the meaning is really straightforward - "deceiving a soul, [in order to] order a ghost [around]", which ties into what the thing actually does. Parsing it any other way, especially each character independently, makes zero sense (e.g. 命 is clearly the verb "to order/command", not "life" as a noun).
last edited at Apr 25, 2022 5:49PM