Oh no....another question about tattoos :-)

[Mike]

Hardly anyone speaks Mandarin Chinese in England, mainly Cantonese. So my exposure in the street to Chinese is limited to seeing peoples tattoos. Yesterday I saw 志 on a woman's upper arm.

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志 (zhì) the will

誌 / 志 (zhì) sign; mark; to record

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Is it clear what this means? Could it mean ambition - but that is 抱负 (bào fù)?

Here's my question.

(1) Tattooists sometimes use templates to guide their work. Is there a Chinese character that when written backward (with the template the wrong way round) means something else?

(2) Two characters together, that when placed immediately side by side mean one thing, but when placed with a gap between them, mean something completely different?

(3) Any character (or character combination) seen as a tattoo that means one thing BUT can also mean something different.

(Bit like punctuation problems in English: 'What is this thing called love?' is quite a different question from 'What is this thing called, love?' Or 'He shot himself as a child' is different from 'He shot, himself, as a child')

[HashiriKata]

志 as a tattoo is quite clear in its general area of meaning (ie. there should arise no ambiguity such as it's intended as meaning "x", and not "y" )

And here's for your 3 questions:

(1) General it'll be meaningless in stead of turning into something else. I'm not aware of such a case.

(2) For a tattoo, I don't think the gap would make any difference. Bear also in mind that written Chinese traditionally relies very little on punctuation, if at all.

(3) This is generally true of words without context. However, being a tattoo in itself is a kind of context.

[skylee]

(1) consider the characters 甲 and 由; 人 and 入; 曱 and 甴 (well nobody would want the last one for a tattoo anyways )

(2) 誌, the word you have mentioned in your post, will have a different meaning if you separate the left and right parts -> 言志

[JonasL]

when I started studying Chinese and some guy's Chinese tattoo caught my attention, I used to memorize the characters and look them up when I got home, I learned to stop doing that because most of the Chinese tattoos don't make sense at all.

yesterday I saw a guy with '刀敬武' tattood on his leg, which means 'knife', 'respect' 'warrior, or something to do with martial arts'

I asked him if he knew what it meant, he told me his Chinese friend told him it meant 'Dragon', I told him his Chinese friend was full of sh*** and said what the characters mean seperatly.

except for 'he who fights with respect for the sword' I couldn't really make anything of it so I asked my girlfriend ( who's from Beijing ), she just laughed and told me how dumb some western people can be by putting tattoos on them in a language they don't understand.

[gamerfu]

I never own anything; I cannot read! People are suckers! (sh)

[Mike]

how dumb some western people can be by putting tattoos on them in a language they don't understand

- Pretty good summary, I'd say :-) Also, I think I like the idea of someone who has a tattoo on their back not realising, in a mirror, that it is the wrong way round!

[Toffeeliz]

I kno what you are on about, Mike. I went into the co-op a while back adn the lass on the till had some wierd marks on her arm that weren't anuything like chinese - but she insisted that that was what it was....can you tell I live in a very strange part of the country? lol ^_^

[Gulao]

1) Well, it's possible to invert some characters and get other characters, but then, Chinese characters are not so symmetric that the same template could be used for both. 由 and 甲 would simply look different if one were inverted. Furthermore, the stroke order for an inverted 由 is different from that of 甲.

2) Not that I'm aware of. But a combination of two characters can have more than one meaning. Case in point, 非常.

3) Not any character, but many characters have more than one meaning, but then that's true of just about any language. Idioms, euphamisms, slang, words that simply have a ton of meanings, and the like are common cross-linguistically.

Generally, you should just be careful with Chinese tattoos. They can even mean what you think they mean, but still not have the effect you intended. The most ready example I can think of is NBA rookie, Sean May, who had the characters, 可以 tattooed onto his upper arm. These characters can translate roughly to "can; be able to," as was the intended effect. But to someone who actually knows the language, the inscription looks... well... dumb. Furthermore, 可以 also has connotations of "may," which, while an amusing pun on the wearer's name, only detracts from the tattoo's intended effect.

Plus it just looks dumb.

[johnmck]

This is my favourite chinese tattoo link:

http://www.hanzismatter.com.nyud.net:8090/lemonchicken.mov

[Steadi]

Not much else to add, the other answers have all been good.

One thing about spacing characters, how you space them or group them doesn't change meaning at all. In fact, in writing, every syllable should have the same spacing before and after it as every other character. It doesn't matter if it is an independent syllable or part of a multisyllable word.

i also agree that anyone getting a tattoo or wearing clothing that has a language they don't understand is silly ...the girls here in China who don't know English and wear shirts like "I am a sex machine" are a good example.

[skylee]

One thing about spacing characters, how you space them or group them doesn't change meaning at all.

Really??

Compare - 叔叔親了我媽媽　也親了我

With - 叔叔親了我　媽媽也親了我

Do you think the grouping doesn't change the meaning at all? (I've found this example on the internet.)

[HashiriKata]

Compare - 叔叔親了我媽媽　也親了我

With - 叔叔親了我　媽媽也親了我

I undestand what you're saying but this is rather "stretched" and not how Chinese is normally written.

[johnmck]

the girls here in China who don't know English and wear shirts like "I am a sex machine" are a good example.

It is the same in France, I have seen women with, "Pussy" and "Fluffer" on jumpers and last week I saw a middle aged woman with "Pillow talk is extra" written on her T-shirt.

[Gulao]

Compare - 叔叔親了我媽媽　也親了我

With - 叔叔親了我　媽媽也親了我

This is normally done with a comma, though, in my experience.

[Steadi]

HashiriKata and Gulao are correct.

Compare - 叔叔親了我媽媽　也親了我

With - 叔叔親了我　媽媽也親了我

This would usually be done with punctuations marks and native speakers would not rely on spacing to do it. Look in Chinese novels and such, you won't find like the above example.

[imron]

To be fair to Skylee, you mentioned that spacing doesn't matter at all. She then shows you a case where spacing obviously makes a difference.

The fact that it isn't usually done like that, doesn't mean that it can't be done like that, and if someone for some strange reason wanted that (or some other phrase) tattoed on their body and the spacing got mixed up, there are times when it would change the meaning. After all, we aren't talking about how people write in a book, we're talking about what happens when they indiscriminately tattoo some Chinese phrase on their body.

But here's another case where spacing is important for things like tattoos. Imagine if someone wanted to tattoo "好", but the tattoo artist put in a bit too much spacing, and made it into "女 子". Obviously in this case spacing makes a difference and you want to hope that the tattoo artist doesn't make a mistake.

[in_lab]

There was one tattoo job like that on hanzismatter.com. The guy wanted 精, so he got 青 one arm and 米 on the other. That's one of my favorites.

[JonasL]

in my opinion 女子 vs 好 is a matter of writing Chinese properly, and putting the radical close enough to the phonetic component. not a matter of spacing.

my gf has a beatiful handwriting and her mother's handwriting is even more interesting, they don't space at all, when they want to eliminate confusion they use commas, not spaces. spacing is not an issue in Chinese.

[imron]

Yes, but we aren't talking about normal writing that is done on paper by native speakers. We are talking about the context of a tattoo artist who quite probably has no more knowledge about writing Chinese characters than the person getting the tattoo, and so spacing (i.e. the spacing between the character components) *does* make a difference.

Especially because when tattooing something on the body, there are space and stylistic constraints that mean a phrase or a character might get split up by someone not knowledgable in Chinese to make it "fit" correctly (e.g. by adding/removing space between parts of a character where no space should be).

Of course these are mistakes that no native speaker or anyone who's learnt a reasonable amount of Chinese would make, however the people doing/getting the tattoo usually aren't too knowledgable about characters.

If you disbelieve such a thing could happen, just look here for an example.

Back to the 好 - 女子 example, imagine someone for some reason wants to get the phrase "美国好" tattooed on their upper arm. The person decides to split the phrase onto two lines

美国

好

But the tattoo artist and the person getting the tattoo don't really know much about Chinese characters and so spacing accidently gets added where it shouldn't be, with the result being:

美国

女子

What the tattoo artist doesn't realise is that by just adding that little bit of space between the 女 and 子 components, he/she has completely changed the meaning of the phrase. Here you can see that the spacing does make a difference.

Anyway, I realise the above example is a bit contrived, and it's not something that anyone who knows about Chinese would make, however people have had stranger Chinese things tattooed on their bodies, so I don't think the example above is so unbelievable.

[JonasL]

well, we know that imron. after all you're posting on 'chinese-forums.com' not on 'ignorant-tattoo-artists-forums.com/help.php

it is indeed a good explenation for somebody with absolutely no knowledge of Chinese ( like some of the people visiting this site & the potential visitors of that second not existing site link given above. )