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Hint - BA Building 01
Wo zhidao, due ma?
(I change a lot of English expressions into Chinese. I have a whole bunch of people at Jiujiang University saying that now.)
..Joe
Here it is
No idea, I just saw it on the internet a while back and thought you guys would find it funny.
One of my tats has some Japanese symbols/letters in it and for years, a Japanese Sous chef friend I worked with would give me a hard time. Each day saying it meant this or that and each time the meaning was different and more and more funny. When he finally left and went to work elsewhere he told me it meant what it was supposed to, but it was his guilty pleasure to torture me like that, LOL
Granted that's simplified Chinese, but if I read it as Japanese it's fire bird 3 Meiji, Meiji being both a period of time in Japanese history or Emperor meiji. I dunno if that's better.
I met someone who said that some Japanese friends had given him the cool nickname "Shimapan". I wondered if he knew it meant "Striped Panties"...
Thanks! That was very helpful!
Lol. After selling my art at a booth at a comic convention next to a bunch of guys dressed as and obsessed with Klingons (in their 40’s and 50’s!) I got an earful about Klingons and later did a satirical Klingon pinup art girl. I downloaded Klingon fonts (who knew they even existed?) and found an online Klingon translater (wow, really?) and created fun tattoos in Klingon for her that only true geeks could decipher. I have never actually watched a full episode of Star Trek (I’m more of a StarGATE person lol) but I learned quite a bit about Klingons and their language!
I have seen Japanese clothing that dropped F-bombs being worn in crowded streets, and clothing brands proudly touting the name "Acne." Funny stuff.
In Japanese anti-establishment subculture there is a practice of using Kanji (Chinese charaters) to sound out Japanese words that had nothing to do with the Kanji. Its purpose is to mock the elite who pride themselves in their superior mastery of Chinese characters. Such usage would appear gibbersih to anyone who tries to interpret the words as Kanji.
My Japanese is very, very rusty but looking at the OP, a few of the gibberish when sounded out in Japanese could be female first names. It would be consistent in that lower class Japanese eateries/watering-holes often adapte female first names and the product is intended as a subculture/underclass alley.
Or I might just be overtthinking this and that the PA is really as clueless as Americans with Chinese character tatttoos.
"Kanji" are Japanes-specific characters. "Hanzi" is the name for Chinese characters.
..Joe
Really interesting thread, and hilarious!
I sat through an international law conference once about human rights where the conference's logo was a photo of a ragged little girl in front of a wall graffitied (?) with Arabic letters. The letters spelled the name of a well-known terrorist organization. No one seemed to have noticed or even entertained the idea that those letters might actually mean something, until I told them in a break, and they took it down. I didn't think they felt particularly grateful towards me. Always the killjoys, those people that actually read things ...
This is a bit off topic but I’ve seen video of Tokyo where they have big signage of stores like Forever 21 and Starbucks written in English and wondering how Japanese are able to read/understand this unless they have mandatory English classes in school? All of our signage for Japanese companies use English/European (not sure what it’s called, Western?) lettering. I couldn’t imagine if Sony, Toyota etc.. were actually written in Japanese letters!
I'm more surprised at the Spongebob artwork in that set...how did that fly by legal?
I do that with Aurebesh in my Star Wars fanart.
Brilliant!
Latin script (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_script)
Reminds me of a story I read some time ago. Road signs in Wales have to be in both English and Welsh. The person in a local council who did the translations was on holiday and his out of the office automatic email reply was in Welsh. Someone emailed a sign to be translated and they put up a sign with the Welsh part saying something like, I'm out of the ofiice, I'll be back on Monday.
I don't know if this is true but it should be.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm
For some reason, I find Engrish very charming and funny. In fact, I'm wearing a shirt today that has sakura blossoms and says enigmatically, "Just Never" across the front. The back has a lovely scene of cranes and sakuras and says, "Wearing too much is a waste of time."
Well, I will try to answer in two parts.
Since English is the global language of commerice, Japan, like most countries, have chosen English as the official foreign language taught in schools. Japan has mandatory K12 system so Japanese pupils have English, or at least supposed to, for 6 years of schooling.
In terms of Japanese writing. Japan actually used Chinese before developed its own writing system. The very educated few, were fluent in Chinese. When Japan did develop its own writing system, they invented two systems: katagana and hiragana. Both are one identical phonetic system but different in how they are written. So Japan today actually use three writing systems in one language. Kanji is the Chinese characters. Katagana is for spelling out words that are not native to Japan (Interent, hamburger etc) and hiragana is for spelling out native words or sounding out kanji characters. All kanji/Chinese words used in Japanese can be written in hiragana or katagana. Japan debated whether to remove all Chinese characters in its wriing system but decided to retain most of it. Sony is not a native Japanese word and also not a Chinese word. It was invented for marketing in English so it's always spelled/written in katagana in Japanese (when English alphbet is not used). Toyota, is atually the Toyoda founder family name which is in kanji. However, Toyoda was Anglified to Toyota for English branding. So today, Toyota in Japan can be spelled/written in katagana (reverse import from Toyota) or Toyoda in kanji, but never in hiragana.
It's fairly complicated to outsiders, and even to natives. The more a Japanese person is educated the more kanji and katagana (English) vocabulary one would have acquired. Hence there developed a tiny antiestblsihment subculture that use kanji to spell out Japanese words that are gibbrerish when read as Chinese characters just as a big F***U to the educated who can navigate the whole kanji/katagana/hiragana system. It's never used for more than a few words and has no official rules. It's what I suspect was used in the Neon Alley product.