#yingko

[yingko-0]

[oldschoolcrimefighters]

I FOUND IT

I finally managed to find the second character of ‘Ying Ko’!

I made a post a long while back of my theory that Ying Ko was a mistranslation. At the time I couldn’t find a reliable image of the characters Gibson used for Ying Ko, and searches weren’t working because there isn’t a Chinese character for the sound ‘Ko’.

Today I opened Fate Joss, glanced at this illustration

And realized holy shit I can look this up finally.

It took some work, but I found it, thanks to this Mandarin Dictionary. The second character is ‘ge’, which actually does sound like ‘ko’ to the untrained American ear, so that blows my frankenword theory.

That’s okay, though, because ‘ge’ means ‘elder brother’.

The Shadow’s Chinese name is fucking ‘Big Brother Shadow’.

I AM TRIUMPHANT AND DELIGHTED.

[oldschoolcrimefighters]

‘Ying Ko’: the Frankenword

aka fun things you learn while researching.

UPDATE AS OF 12/12/16: Newer information has debunked this theory. I’m leaving this post otherwise untouched for posterity, but check out the new post for the actual translation of Ying Ko.

Full disclosure: I am not the slightest bit fluent in any Asian language, much less the two I'm about to mention. I may be wrong or misled in my conclusion.

That said, did you know that The Shadow's well-known nickname 'Ying Ko' is a mistranslation?

The Shadow's nicknames across languages tend to be pretty literal translations. "La Sombra" is the most obvious; "El Ombre" is a little more oblique but 'ombre' does refer to shading, if not shadows exactly; "Khaibet" is an Egyptian concept referring to shadows and souls. "Ying Ko" follows a similar pattern, but when I looked it up, nobody could seem to agree on its exact translation.

Sure, 'Ying' ( 影 ) in a sense means 'shadow', but in a kind of wibbly and disputed way. 'Ko', on the other hand, apparently doesn't mean a damn thing in Chinese, and I can’t even find a character for it.

Meanwhile, there's this word 'Yingzi' ( 影子 ), which translates more solidly to shadows and darkness. It’s close enough that I figured it may have been the intended word, but that Gibson screwed up the phonetic rendering. (Considering English somehow got ‘Peking’ out of ‘Beijing’ I didn’t consider 'zi’ to ‘ko’ a stretch.)

Curious about this phenomenon, I put in a plea on the Little Details livejournal group. The responses didn't seem terribly helpful... until I did a little visual cross-referencing.

evilcoc0nut: One addition is that 子 ko in Japanese is child.

Well, wouldja look at that -- isn’t that a familiar character?

I figure my theory was pretty close:  影子 was the intended nickname, but a wire got crossed somewhere in the translation process, producing the lingual chimera ‘Ying Ko’.

(Fun fact: The characters 影子 in Japanese are pronounced Kage Ko and roughly translate to Shadow Child.)