to: Tian
date: Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 7:20 PM
subject: Tattoo Translation Question
I found your website about a week ago and was wondering if you could translate what this says, the picture comes from a good friend. There are two different things, with the top character being separate from the other ones. I'm not sure what the top one is supposed to mean, and I'm pretty sure the bottom one is supposed to be her name. After reading through your website though I learned that there really isn't a way to translate specific characters, like for names so I'm interested in what the heck it actually is.
It might be in Japanese, I forget what she had told me.
Thanks.
Top character 氷 is Japanese-specific, meaning "ice". Second character 加 means "add".
"Smirnoff ice"?
Who knows what they were trying to write, but it looks like they were using a dictionary and put the pronunciations of the characters in (and messed that up too?).
ReplyDelete加（か）天（てん）← They only have the てfrom てん.
Taking the last two as KA + TE, I guess she is called Kate. Or ice (s)kate??
ReplyDeleteI agree with Anon @9:21. Who knows what this is supposed to mean?
ReplyDeleteBut here is another theory on where they came up with these characters. Maybe they were copying from some dictionary that lists the hiragana characters and the kanji from which they were derived. So:
加→か
天→て
-Alan
Let me guess, the lady's name is Kate? And somebody was looking up how to spell that in kanji, and wrote both the kanji and their hiragana spelling. All the while not realizing that "Kate" is pronounced differently than the romaji spelling "kate".
ReplyDelete蛙(a)鳴(mei)人(zin) :-)
@anonymous: 天 does have the nanori reading "te".
It seems to me that the last four signs are two cases of a kana preceded by the kanji from which it was derived, which makes it even more mysterious what these people were thinking. Rodger C
ReplyDelete氷 means "ice" in Korean as well (and most Korean hanja are the same as their traditional Chinese counterparts). Does Chinese really not use that character?
ReplyDeleteFrom what I can tell, 氷 is a Japanese variant of 冰.
ReplyDelete氷 means "ice" in Korean as well (and most Korean hanja are the same as their traditional Chinese counterparts). Does Chinese really not use that character?
ReplyDeleteKoreans DO NOT use 氷 anymore. They use either the Koreanized "ai-suh" from English ICE or the Modern Chinese character 冰. Since 氷 was an ancient Chinese character, it's no longer used in Modern Chinese. The Modern Chinese character = 冰. Japanese still used Chinese characters they borrowed since the Tang dynasty, which existed between 618 & 907!
夭て... Calamity or death with a bad conjugation or is that the furigana for it and they just stuck it at the bottom?
ReplyDeleteice add (ga particle for the subject?!?) accident/death?
"The ice added to the accident" without any gramatical markers?