"Elevated Grace"
From reader "Chris B.":
"For your amusement, I have attached a photo of my boss' tattoo. He thought it would mean 'Sarah', his wife's name. My girlfriend (she is Chinese) informed me that the first means 'more/better' and the second means 'elegant'. The second one is found in women's names a lot though."
Acording to about.com, the correct phonetic translation of the name "Sarah" to Chinese is:
莎拉
The two characters tattooed meant "more elegant" or "elevated grace", and I don't know if they are phonetically closer to "Sarah" in Japanese pronounciation.
更雅
posted by tian at
2:02 PM
6 Comments:
In Japanese, 更 can be pronounced "sara" (it sounds like "sahra" to English speakers). The second character would be pronounced "ga" or "miya(bi)," or in names, "masa," "masashi" or "tsune."
Awsome stuff. This is making me laugh.
Sarah in Hebrew means "Princess." Perhaps the original designer was going for a non-phonetic translation.
莎拉 (pronounced "sha la") is a common transliteration for "Sarah", but it's pronounced the same as the Chinese word for "salad". If you take away the grass radical from the first character, you get "salad" (沙拉).
That's the problem, a person reading the characters as Japanese Kanji characters would pronounce it as indicated in the first comment, but a person reading it in Chinese would pronounce it "geng ya" if speaking Mandarin or "gung ah" if speaking Cantonese... it all depends on what language/dialect you're speaking...
perhaps in this case its a mistaken mixture of 2 languages by the artist.
i.e. 更 as sara, in japanese and 雅 as ya, in chinese giving : sara-ya
Also it does seem that in these tatoo posts theres not much reflection in Korean, a language which uses Chinese characters extensively, with slightly different pronunciation.
For example 雅 is a character found very common in female Korean names, and is pronounced 'ah'.
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