Thursday, December 4, 2008

please interpret...

from: Jessica ***** <************@hotmail.com>
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 7:32 PM
subject: please interpret...

OMG - I have been looking for your site for years! I am so glad that I found someone to interpret and tell me how bad my tattoo really is. This is suppossed to say "SMS" - my ex's initials. I have never really known what exactly it said and would love to know that my body doesn't hold his name. Can you please help me! I would be very greatful to finally figure this mystery out. Thanks.



Congratulations, Jessica! The tattoo is gibberish.


Related: Gibberish Asian Font
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7 comments:

  1. 阳阳December 7, 2008 at 4:03 PM

    I guess this is good news for her, although I'm not sure a meaningless gibberish tattoo is necessarily a good thing to have. What boggles my mind is, why would anyone assume that initials, of all things, can be translated into a language that doesn't use a phonetic writing system, and even if it did, would probably not be using the same alphabet? ^^;

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  2. BrettDecember 10, 2008 at 11:58 PM

    LOL, did this girl even think for a second that some other languages don't use the English alphabet? I guess if she's stupid enough to get someone else's initials tattooed on her then she's stupid enough not to know what her tattoo says.

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  3. AnonymousDecember 12, 2008 at 11:15 AM

    Look on the bright side, Jessica--it now means whatever you want it to mean.

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  4. xenobiologistaDecember 14, 2008 at 1:46 PM

    Going off on a tangent...what's the colloquial Mandarin word for "SMS" as in short messaging service/text messaging? Does it vary by region?

    Back to the topic, I guess this Jessica didn't know about the "tattoo curse" either...if you get your partner's name tattooed on you, the relationship is doomed.

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  5. gabeDecember 15, 2008 at 10:42 PM

    i would say 短訊 for txt msg in mandarin

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  6. ulasDecember 25, 2008 at 6:34 AM

    SMS in Chinese, as on Wikipedia:

    As input by user: 短信
    Simplified: 短信
    Traditional: 簡訊
    PRC: 短信
    Hong Kong: 短訊
    Malaysia-Singapore: 短信
    Taiwan: 簡訊

    The other Hanzi (Kanji) using languages are as follows;

    Japanese: ショートメッセージサービス (directly loaned English word written in Katakana)
    Korean: 단문 메시지 서비스 (a mix of Sino-Korean word, Hanja form written as: 短文+English word)

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  7. Qi ChinFebruary 2, 2009 at 10:31 AM

    I'm really amazed at the ignorance some people have towards other languages. Why would she think that Chinese, of all languages, which has thousands of individual characters which are words by themselves, would be able to spell the letter combination "SMS"?

    This might be me being a linguist, but I find this so very cringe-worthy.

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