
Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006) - polm23
http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html
======
GoodDreams
The customer contract at the tattoo shop I worked at required customer to take
full responsibility for understanding their tattoo, especially non-English
words.

Also customers had to attest that they are not or have ever been a lawyer. The
only person who read the entirety of the contract admitted she was a
recovering lawyer. The tattoo artist made an exception.

Random side note: the artist I worked for fought for legislation to require
tattoo ink manufacturers to publish the ingredients they use. Anyone know if
such legislation ever passed?

~~~
pengstrom
Why couldn't lawyers also be customers?

~~~
zingermc
Probably a joke, but I'm guessing the implication is that lawyers are
litigious.

It feels wrong, but profession is not a protected class in the US. Maybe this
is a kind of discrimination that is legal.

~~~
marcosdumay
> Maybe this is a kind of discrimination that is legal.

Well, there is a way to be sure.

~~~
pure-awesome
You mean asking a legal professional?

~~~
entropicdrifter
I feel like trolling lawyers is a good way to get schooled for free

~~~
marcosdumay
I see you are using a new and creative definition of "free"...

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z2
Surprisingly it isn't mentioned what the characters mean at all. Most of the
non-decomposed characters are martial arts related: 功夫 kung fu, 武術 martial
arts, 空手 karate, 道場 dojo, 氣 qi/ki (air), 流 flowing, 安 peace, 康 health, 極 the
'chi' from taichi, and 拳 fist.

Some even line up with the letter, using Chinese or Japanese pronunciation,
e.g. fu from kung fu, jitsu, kara from karate, ryu.

The rest seems to be corruption from these building blocks.

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etatoby
To play devil's advocate, such a thing as transcribing Western names
phonetically using Chinese characters _does_ exist, both in contemporary
Chinese and in other historical or minority Chinese-derived languages, as well
as in old Japanese.

Here are the current rules for standard Chinese:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_characters)

And here is some information about the same thing historically done in
Japanese:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji)

That being said, I have only glanced at that tattoo table and it seems wildly
inaccurate and simplified. But the underlying concept does exist.

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bemmu
Archived version of the link for the $64.99 tattoo design sheet:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20071107072926/http://www.natura...](https://web.archive.org/web/20071107072926/http://www.naturalexpressions.org/Tattoo_Flash_CKE2.html)

~~~
HuangYuSan
Oh captain my captain

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yorwba
This doesn't explain how the mapping from Latin characters was originally
determined. I thought it might just be the result of a font for a legacy
character encoding being used with ASCII data, but that doesn't seem to be the
case. Of all the legacy encodings (shift-jis, gb18030, big5 etc.) my Python
installation supports, the only encoding that produces CJK for bytes < 128 is
UTF-16:

    
    
      import encodings
      import unicodedata
      
      def try_default(default, f, *args, **kwargs):
        try: return f(*args, **kwargs)
        except: return default
      
      b = bytes(range(128))
      for encoding in set(encodings.aliases.aliases.values()):
        s = try_default('', b.decode, encoding)
        if any('CJK' in try_default('', unicodedata.name, c) for c in s):
          print(encoding, ''.join(c for c in s if c.isprintable()))
    

prints

    
    
      utf_16_be ȃЅ؇ࠉฏထሓᐕᘗ᠙ᨛᰝḟ‡∣␥⠩⨫Ⱝⸯ〱㈳㐵㘷㠹㨻㰽㸿䁁䉃䑅䙇䡉䩋䱍乏偑剓呕噗塙婛屝幟恡扣摥晧桩橫汭湯灱牳瑵癷硹穻籽繿
      utf_16_le Ā̂Ԅ܆ईଊഌ༎ᄐጒᔔᤘᬚᴜ℠⌢┤⤨⬪⼮㌲㔴㜶㤸㬺㴼㼾䅀䍂䕄䝆䥈䭊䵌低児卒啔坖奘孚嵜彞慠换敤杦楨歪浬潮煰獲畴睶祸筺絼罾
      utf_16 Ā̂Ԅ܆ईଊഌ༎ᄐጒᔔᤘᬚᴜ℠⌢┤⤨⬪⼮㌲㔴㜶㤸㬺㴼㼾䅀䍂䕄䝆䥈䭊䵌低児卒啔坖奘孚嵜彞慠换敤杦楨歪浬潮煰獲畴睶祸筺絼罾
    

Those probably have too many strokes to look good in a tattoo.

~~~
VeninVidiaVicii
You're probably looking at it too systematically. I bet it was just made by
some tattooist with pen and paper before the days of the mass adoption of
encoding standards.

------
raverbashing
It's funny how knowledge about other cultures gets "extruded" through narrow
channels resulting in something that looks like it make sense for someone with
a shallow understanding of languages but essentially doesn't.

Same with non-ligated Arabic writing (just as a start), "Viking" Vegvisirs
(big roll eyes for this one), etc

~~~
tinus_hn
Also see the SuperDry brand of clothes which features nonsensical, though
deliberately inoffensive Japanese writing.

~~~
chrischen
Hey it happens on the other side with nonsensical English writing on clothes
too.

~~~
knolax
And it's equally irritating to see.

~~~
Smithalicious
That is to say, neither is irritating (to me, at least).

~~~
themaninthedark
I have a picture somewhere of a beauty parlor in Kyoto who's name is Yaoi Hair
Brains Faerie.

Also an apartment building named "Space Pope F" which besides being an awesome
name made me wounder what happen to all the other Space Popes and if they are
being counted alphabetically or hexadecimal.

------
tasogare
My best Asian tatoo anecdote: I was at a party and chatted with a girl that
had a five Chinese characters tatto. I deciphered it as "the mountain cat
search a family". The girl correct me on the first word which meant lynx
(which was correct), but was otherwise super impressed.

« — You are the first person I ever met that understand it!!

— No big deal, I’m read some Chinese.

— It’s Japanese tho.

— Yeah, it’s Japanese... »

Then I walked away without telling her I was majoring... in Japanese.

~~~
StavrosK
I don't understand, was it Japanese or not?

~~~
ddevault
The two written languages are, to a small degree, mutually intelligible. But
it's like translating by converting a sentence to a bunch of on-topic words in
no particular order which convey ideas from the original, often including a
few wrong ideas that leak from anachronisms.

Example: "I went on a hike and saw a 'mountain dark fly alive thing'
yesterday!" probably means an owl or something.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> 'mountain dark fly alive thing'

山暗飞生物? I'd be pretty shocked at a word for an indigenous species (like "owl")
that was more than two characters.

~~~
ddevault
The example was not meant to be taken literally.

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nailer
Hrm the mystery isn't really solved though. I'd have expected them to have
traced it to a particular tattoo shop.

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notkaiho
Hanzi Smatter is doing honest work that is making the world a better place. I
have enjoyed the cringe-factor over the years, I'm glad the site is still
around for people to refer to.

~~~
henrikschroder
I had never seen the blog before, and just spent way too much time reading it.

It's completely astounding to me that people would permanently mark their skin
with text, without being able to read the text themselves!

------
kevinwang
The "Asian font" link doesn't work anymore - here's an updated link:
[http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/search?q=asian+font](http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/search?q=asian+font)

looks like a lot of people got their "initials" tattooed.

~~~
tyingq
The comments section mentioned Kim Maher (US Olympian, Softball) apparently
having her last name done in this font:
[https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bQ0SqifjNcg/TQk-m5gFHSI/AAAAAAAAf...](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bQ0SqifjNcg/TQk-m5gFHSI/AAAAAAAAfE8/fxQXddNlTe0/s1600/kim-
maher-tattoo.jpg)

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irrational
Wow. And I thought the charts of "translating" the English Alphabet to
Egyptian Hieroglyphics were bad. At least there is some correspondence between
some of the uniliteral Egyptian signs and the English Alphabet. These Chinese
examples seem to be totally made up.

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Sniffnoy
Non-mobile link: [https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-
fo...](https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-
solved.html)

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shrimpx
Pretty closely representative of "cargo cult."

~~~
pacaro
Somewhere in that realm for sure, maybe closer to Malinchism

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism)

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yitchelle
That is totally amazing. I am surprised that this idea has not been copied by
the tattoo artist for other hieroglyphic based language. Here is a list to get
started.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyph)

~~~
wl
Tattoo artists and trinket-makers already do something similar with the
Egyptian hieroglyph uniliterals. It's not complete gibberish, but most names
would be better written in other ways.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian#Uniliteral_signs)

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josteink
So basically, there is no love (愛) put into this in this simplified "Asian"
language.

Colour me surprised :)

