7 ms·

Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006)

91 points by polm23 7y ago

raverbashing 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Also see the SuperDry brand of clothes which features nonsensical, though deliberately inoffensive Japanese writing.
  - chrischen 7y ago
    Hey it happens on the other side with nonsensical English writing on clothes too.
    - knolax 7y ago
      And it's equally irritating to see.
      - Smithalicious 7y ago
        That is to say, neither is irritating (to me, at least).
        themaninthedark 7y ago
        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.
        knolax 7y ago
        In my experience persistent exposure to either wears away at your sanity after a while.
GoodDreams 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Why couldn't lawyers also be customers?
  - zingermc 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      > Maybe this is a kind of discrimination that is legal. Well, there is a way to be sure.
      - pure-awesome 7y ago
        You mean asking a legal professional?
        entropicdrifter 7y ago
        I feel like trolling lawyers is a good way to get schooled for free
        7y ago
nailer 7y ago
Hrm the mystery isn't really solved though. I'd have expected them to have traced it to a particular tattoo shop.
yitchelle 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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_Egyptian#Uniliteral_signs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...
Sniffnoy 7y ago
Non-mobile link: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-fo...
bemmu 7y ago
Archived version of the link for the $64.99 tattoo design sheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20071107072926/http://www.naturalexpressions.org/Tattoo_Flash_CKE2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071107072926/http://www.natura...
- HuangYuSan 7y ago
  Oh captain my captain
josteink 7y ago
So basically, there is no love (愛) put into this in this simplified "Asian" language. Colour me surprised :)
kevinwang 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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/AAAAAAAAfE8/fxQXddNlTe0/s1600/kim-maher-tattoo.jpg https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bQ0SqifjNcg/TQk-m5gFHSI/AAAAAAAAf...
notkaiho 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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!
- helb 7y ago
  Well, thanks. I just spent half an hour on that blog. Toilet demon: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2016/04/from-sabreen-p.html https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2016/04/from-sabreen-p.htm... Little pig, big mistake: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2015/07/from-james-l.html https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2015/07/from-james-l.html
yorwba 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
z2 7y ago
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.
shrimpx 7y ago
Pretty closely representative of "cargo cult."
- pacaro 7y ago
  Somewhere in that realm for sure, maybe closer to Malinchism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism
tasogare 7y ago
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.
- mstade 7y ago
  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...
- StavrosK 7y ago
  I don't understand, was it Japanese or not?
  - dazhengca 7y ago
    Probably kanji, Chinese characters
  - bsznjyewgd 7y ago
    It was in Chinese but the girl thought it was in Japanese.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      But then why would majoring in Japanese matter? Unless it was Kanji?
      - irrational 7y ago
        Because he recognized that she was wrong. It was Chinese and not Japanese.
irrational 7y ago
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.
etatoby 7y ago
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_characters 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 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.

91 points by polm23 7y ago

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 7y ago
Also see the SuperDry brand of clothes which features nonsensical, though deliberately inoffensive Japanese writing.
- chrischen 7y ago
  Hey it happens on the other side with nonsensical English writing on clothes too.
  - knolax 7y ago
    And it's equally irritating to see.
    - Smithalicious 7y ago
      That is to say, neither is irritating (to me, at least).
      - themaninthedark 7y ago
        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.
      - knolax 7y ago
        In my experience persistent exposure to either wears away at your sanity after a while.

GoodDreams 7y ago

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 7y ago
Why couldn't lawyers also be customers?
- zingermc 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    > Maybe this is a kind of discrimination that is legal. Well, there is a way to be sure.
    - pure-awesome 7y ago
      You mean asking a legal professional?
      - entropicdrifter 7y ago
        I feel like trolling lawyers is a good way to get schooled for free
        7y ago

nailer 7y ago

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

yitchelle 7y ago

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 7y ago
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_Egyptian#Uniliteral_signs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...

Sniffnoy 7y ago

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

bemmu 7y ago

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

HuangYuSan 7y ago
Oh captain my captain

josteink 7y ago

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

kevinwang 7y ago

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 7y ago
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/AAAAAAAAfE8/fxQXddNlTe0/s1600/kim-maher-tattoo.jpg https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bQ0SqifjNcg/TQk-m5gFHSI/AAAAAAAAf...

notkaiho 7y ago

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 7y ago
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!
helb 7y ago
Well, thanks. I just spent half an hour on that blog. Toilet demon: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2016/04/from-sabreen-p.html https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2016/04/from-sabreen-p.htm... Little pig, big mistake: https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2015/07/from-james-l.html https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2015/07/from-james-l.html

yorwba 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

z2 7y ago

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.

shrimpx 7y ago

Pretty closely representative of "cargo cult."

pacaro 7y ago
Somewhere in that realm for sure, maybe closer to Malinchism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinchism

tasogare 7y ago

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.

mstade 7y ago
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...
StavrosK 7y ago
I don't understand, was it Japanese or not?
- dazhengca 7y ago
  Probably kanji, Chinese characters
- bsznjyewgd 7y ago
  It was in Chinese but the girl thought it was in Japanese.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    But then why would majoring in Japanese matter? Unless it was Kanji?
    - irrational 7y ago
      Because he recognized that she was wrong. It was Chinese and not Japanese.

irrational 7y ago

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.

etatoby 7y ago

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_characters 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 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.