Talk:蜷

river + snail or river snail (Viviparidae)

The gloss, "an edible river snail", doesn't help. It isn't even clear whether it means

1. a particular snail,
2. a particular group of snails,
3. any snail found in a river,
4. any snail found in fresh water,
5. any member or certain members of family Viviparidae

Can anyone disambiguate this? The problem is not unique to this entry, nor to CJKV entries, nor to FL entries. DCDuring (talk) 04:24, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

蜷 leads me to ニナ, "general term for mollusks with slender shells", or "general term for a set of 巻貝", and カワニナ, "Semisulcospira libertina". —Suzukaze-c◇◇ 04:28, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

That's the kind of thing that confuses me. Some of the terms could be either quite generic, the equivalent of mollusc or bivalve or snail, or even shellfish or refer to a specific family, genus, or species, or to something like freshwater + snail. It is the definition writer that typically is insensitive to the range of possibilities. Any explicit marker of uncertainty (like "certain freshwater snails") is better than an unmodified noun, ie, no adjective or determiner. DCDuring (talk) 05:12, 23 July 2018 (UTC)