I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend's names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.

We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.

[–] OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But...what did it mean?

[–] Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don't mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you'd get like "cabbage the horse wheel" or something.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.

That reminds me of the "Password Strength" comic by xkcd. All right, it's settled. Next time I need new password, I'm feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

So the characters are still words, right?

Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it's written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can't invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there's no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.

I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don't cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn't look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Tristán is a proper local name in Spanish

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 points 2 months ago

I'm aware, it was just the first English name and Spanish word I could think of that sounded similar for the example.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The Chinese English professor told me that my name meant something like "strong ox" and hers meant "beautiful lotus," but I have no way to verify that, as I no longer have the box. She does.

[–] marcyiu@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Ooo may I have a guess - Daniel and Lilian?

edit - typo

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nope.

[–] marcyiu@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah nevermind then. Thought I got what the characters were haha

[–] Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Upvote because I was sure you'd have it.

[–] savx@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

i would guess your name is John? "strong ox" seems 犟 to me(upper part is strong, bottom ox), beautiful lotus i got no idea.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Shawn actually. But that does seem similar to the character he gave me