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?
That mays be valid if the customer provides the design. But if they show up and ask for a design provided by the tattoo shop then the shop cannot wash their hands off liability with this kind of clause (at least in many jurisdictions).
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.
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.
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()))
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.
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
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.
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.
It wasn’t. It was Chinese without any ambiguity[2] because of the word order[1]. Also, Japanese equivalent would have been longer and used characters specific to Japanese (hiragana) to write flexion of the verb, and casual particles.
[1] One could argue it may have been kanbun, that is Classical Chinese read with Japanese readings, but I think the character meaning cat was written in its simplified form (which is the same in Japanese and Simplified Chinese) so this rule this out. And someone which that much knowledge would state it if it was the case.
[2] Edit: the choice of vocabulary, while existing in Chinese, leaned a bit towards Japanese. I'm asking native Chinese speaker for confirmation. So, it was a weird mix, but not real Japanese.
PS: as far as I remember is was written 山猫求家族 but I may be wrong.
Whenever I see someone wearing a tattoo with characters like these I can't help but wonder if it's actually what the wearer believes it to be, or if it's just items off a take-out menu...
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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?
It feels wrong, but profession is not a protected class in the US. Maybe this is a kind of discrimination that is legal.
Deleted Comment
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.
Here are the current rules for standard Chinese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...
And here is some information about the same thing historically done in Japanese:
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.
Same with non-ligated Arabic writing (just as a start), "Viking" Vegvisirs (big roll eyes for this one), etc
« — 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.
Example: "I went on a hike and saw a 'mountain dark fly alive thing' yesterday!" probably means an owl or something.
[1] One could argue it may have been kanbun, that is Classical Chinese read with Japanese readings, but I think the character meaning cat was written in its simplified form (which is the same in Japanese and Simplified Chinese) so this rule this out. And someone which that much knowledge would state it if it was the case.
[2] Edit: the choice of vocabulary, while existing in Chinese, leaned a bit towards Japanese. I'm asking native Chinese speaker for confirmation. So, it was a weird mix, but not real Japanese.
PS: as far as I remember is was written 山猫求家族 but I may be wrong.
Deleted Comment
Whenever I see someone wearing a tattoo with characters like these I can't help but wonder if it's actually what the wearer believes it to be, or if it's just items off a take-out menu...