Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006)

hanzismatter.blogspot.com

91 pointspolm2351 comments

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?

Why couldn't lawyers also be customers?

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.

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

Well, there is a way to be sure.

You mean asking a legal professional?

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

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

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.

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.

Archived version of the link for the $64.99 tattoo design sheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20071107072926/http://www.natura...

Oh captain my captain

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.

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

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

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

And it's equally irritating to see.

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

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.

In my experience persistent exposure to either wears away at your sanity after a while.

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.

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

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.

Owl is cat-head-eagle 猫头鹰(Mandarin). :)

> '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.

The example was not meant to be taken literally.

Ah, I see, thank you.

It was explained to me by a Japanese literature teacher this is why Asian people so readily took to and love emojis.

Not because they’re cute but because they’re are semi-reflective of how they’re used to reading.

Edit: HN won’t let me paste emoji examples :( they were pretty good I thought.

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.

Could it perhaps have been a Chinese language other than Mandarin, where the vocabulary choice would not be out of place?

That clarifies it, thanks.

It was in Chinese but the girl thought it was in Japanese.

But then why would majoring in Japanese matter? Unless it was Kanji?

Because he recognized that she was wrong. It was Chinese and not Japanese.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101124040141/http://spikedmath...

On a radically different note, I find it kind of surreal that comics 334 and 335 have been silently excised from this comic's archives page, and #333 now links forward to #336.

Probably kanji, Chinese characters

Great story, thanks for sharing!

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...

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

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.

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!

Well, thanks. I just spent half an hour on that blog.

Toilet demon: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2016/04/from-sabreen-p.htm...

Little pig, big mistake: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2015/07/from-james-l.html

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

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

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...

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.

Non-mobile link: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-fo...

Pretty closely representative of "cargo cult."

Somewhere in that realm for sure, maybe closer to Malinchism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism

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

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...

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

Colour me surprised :)

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