"Desire"
From reader “Burak I.”:
“Dear Friend, My name is Burak and I saw your website by chance when surfing. I have a Chinese tattoo too and I'm very curious what it means in real. As I know, it means "desire" or pronounced as ‘Arzu’ which means desire in Turkish. I hope you can help me.”
Sometime I feel bad for the ones gotten Chinese tattoos from phonetic translations. Granted, Burak’s tattoo phonetically is correct, but it was still a struggle for me and my associates to decipher the true translation.
Jeremy replied with: “Men门? Ming 明天? Er, burritos?”
Brendan replied with: “Well - since we know that he's going for the pronunciation 'Arzu’, the first one could just be 阿. That'd be my guess, anyway -- but it looks like 'er' and 'zhu' have been reversed.”
John replied with: “At first I thought the right half looked like it could be a squashed right half of 阿. But the left side didn't work. Then I thought the left half could be the left half of 所. But the right side didn't work. The right side looks like a backwards 巨. In conclusion: I think Jeremy's guess (門) is good...”
阿 = prefix for people's names; used in transliteration
尔 (traditional version: 爾) = you; that, those; final particle
助 = help, aid, assist
posted by tian at
11:29 PM
4 Comments:
D'oh - what was I talking about, saying that 'er' and 'zhu' had been reversed? Brain fart!
Anyway -- yeah; I'm now pretty sure that the first one is supposed to be 'a' - the left half is just an indistinct and squashed 阝. It's not exactly the best-looking calligraphy, but at least it says what he wanted.
Hi dear Tian,its a while I come here and anytime I read about these tatoos I remember the one on back of the member of Russian music band Tatu.Im Persian and that tatoo seems to be in Farsi too but I couldnt find any record of that word(heiam) in Farsi.Do you have any idea about that?Im interested in tatoos and you are donig a nice work here.Thanks.
man
www.mensroom.blogspot.com
menzroum@yahoo.com
I have found some photos of the Russian duo Tatu (or Taty), but I don't recognize the tattoo on her.
Yeah, the 阝 is squashed at the top. I can see that now, I guess...
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