Sunday, September 27, 2009

    from: trellz
    to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
    date: Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:13 PM
    subject: tatoo submission

    Should say stupid American, or stupid foreign person.

    Picture 140

    美国人 is Chinese for "American".

    However 阿呆 (or あほ) is a localize dialect for "fool, jackass" in Japan's Kansai region. Where most Japanese would use 馬鹿 as "stupid". Also, 米囯人 is Japanese for "American".

    愚蠢
    is correct Chinese for "stupid".

Saturday, September 12, 2009

    from: Victor H. Mair
    to: tiangotlost@gmail.com,
    date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM
    subject: tattoo

    Hi Tian,

    Perhaps you can post this for me on HANZISMATTER.

    Victor

    ======

    The attached picture, sent to me by Jonathan Smith, shows a basketball player's "Chinese" tattoos. They read 康女宀 from top to bottom: KANG1 ("peace, vigor") NÜ3 ("woman") MIAN2 ("shelter, thatch"). Yet the proud owner claims that they are "my initials in Chinese, M.A.D."

    Marquis Antoine Daniels

    My best guess as to how this may have happened is that the basketball player approached a tattooist who was minimally literate (or illiterate) in Chinese or English (or both) and showed him / her his initials, requesting the tattooist to "write them in Chinese symbols / characters / ideographs / hieroglyphs / pictographs / whatever." The initials may have been more or less ornately written, with the result that the tattooist came up with these three HANZI as his / her best representation of what he / she was seeing. For example, if you twist around in different orientations, you can sort of see an "A" there. Ditto for the other two HANZI.

    =======

    victor

    --

    Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature
    Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
    University of Pennsylvania