Chinese/Japanese sign

April 23, 2007 3:00 PM

What does this Chinese/Japanese (?) sign mean? It's in big print on a good looking second hand t-shirt I just bought. I hope that after you all-knowing people have translated it for me, I'll feel more comfortable wearing it.
posted by pica to writing & language (19 comments total)

http://www.manythings.org/kanji/d/5951.htm
posted by coffeee at 3:10 PM on April 23, 2007

Heh. You could see from the calligraphy it was Japanese, and I see from coffeee's link it has quite a pleasant meaning in that language.
I thought it looked a bit odd on a t-shirt as in modern Chinese (契 qì) you most usually see it in words for contracts or written agreements. Might be good to wear to a Beijing business school :p
posted by Abiezer at 3:20 PM on April 23, 2007

I agree - looked it up in my dictionary - KEI/chigiru. The upper two signs mean tally/cut and the bottom sign means big, so it's a significant tally - ie, a pledge.
posted by plinth at 3:22 PM on April 23, 2007

Seconding Plinth - pledge, promise, vow.
posted by ikahime at 3:49 PM on April 23, 2007

1. You can tell from the calligraphy it was made by someone with only vaguely acquainted Chinese characters. Japanese and Chinese lettering styles are a little different, but that's a chicken scratch.

2. You can't decompose characters into their radicals and other parts to extract their meaning—at best, stuff like "significant tally = pledge" is a mnemonic when learning the characters. Yes, the radical usually gives you a broad sense of the subject, and yes, decomposing works in some cases like 明 if you use your imagination, but what about, oh, 機, which would decompose into something like "how many trees?". In 契, the radical (大) doesn't really tell you much of anything.
posted by adamrice at 4:45 PM on April 23, 2007

When it comes to Japanese, you can't necessarily even rely on the nominal Chinese meanings of the kanji, because sometimes they're used for their sound-values only. My favorite example of that:

馬 -- horse
鹿 -- deer
野 -- civilian life; plains; field; rustic
郎 -- counter for sons; son

Put 'em all together and you get 馬鹿野郎 bakayarou.

But another way to show that is to observe that there are alternate kanji representations of the same word. For instance, 退屈 and 怠屈 are both proper spellings of taikutsu, which means "tedium, boredom". (And none of the three kanji have meanings which have anything to do with tedium or boredom.)

Getting back to the OP, the glyph in question does mean "pledge" but it isn't a word in Japanese. That kanji never stands alone. (And to my unschooled eye, the calligraphy is a bit strange.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:20 PM on April 23, 2007

Maybe it's some kind of fraternity thing?
posted by exceptinsects at 5:22 PM on April 23, 2007

The main point is what adamrice said, that is just plain ugly. Perhaps it was a kanji tattoo template done by some meth-head.
posted by planetkyoto at 5:52 PM on April 23, 2007

Here's the Unihan entry for that character. When it stands alone in Chinese it means "contract". It never stands alone in Japanese.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:08 PM on April 23, 2007

I don't get all the hating on the lettering/calligraphy here; not my cup of tea, but the proportions look no worse than thousands of other (wannabe) artsy fonts I've seen over the years.
I'd bet it was drawn or at least traced from something by a native writer. The strokes vary in thickness in the kind of places they do when you can actually read the character.
posted by Abiezer at 8:09 PM on April 23, 2007

Well, except maybe I'd have extended the line on the 丰 element properly; but really, the things the Japanese have done with these wonderful symbols :p
posted by Abiezer at 8:11 PM on April 23, 2007

Oh, and to complete my contrarian smart-arsery from the perspective of the language this was apparently only borrowed from, what you say that about decomposing characters may be true for Japanese, adamrice, but in Chinese the radical is often a good guide to spheres of meaning and the other elements are likely phonetic. I advise anyone hoping to learn to get into the habit of considering the elements that make up a character.
And that's even before we get into 拆字 (glyphomancy).
posted by Abiezer at 8:19 PM on April 23, 2007

"Illiterate"
posted by Methylviolet at 11:04 PM on April 23, 2007

I can't open the picture but I take it from the comments that the characters are 契機? The wenlin Chinese dictionary program has it as "契机[-機] ¹qìjī* n. 〈phil.〉 1. juncture; turning/critical point 2. moment"

That seems to make the most sense as something you would put on a t shirt.
posted by afu at 2:06 AM on April 24, 2007

Abeizer: As I said, you can get a broad sense of the meaning from the radical, and in Japanese, the remainder often gives a guide to the Chinese-derived pronunciation (though because those pronunciations were borrowed at various points in history, between which the Chinese language changed a lot, we get weird outcomes like 明 being "mei" "min" or "myo" depending on context, and 鷺 having 17 possible readings). As to the letterform itself—the way the 刀 element in the corner is formed gives it away as non-native, if nothing else does. Oh, and the Chinese have shown great reverence for their wonderful symbols. :p

Afu: The character is just 契.
posted by adamrice at 6:58 AM on April 24, 2007

I realised you'd said that already once I re-read your comment properly adam. That 刀 did look like a 口 at first glance, but I still say not outside the bounds of bad handwriting! (Never give in in a pointless argument, me mum said :D)
I'd already comment-spammed here enough when the thought occurred to me reading SCDB's thing about bakayarou above that in fact the characters may be meaningful. There's a Chinese saying sort of related to foolishness, "指鹿为马," and you could cook up some sort of cod etymology for 野郎 if you tried, so I thought it could be possible it implied something like "klutzy lad of the type to mix up a horse and a deer."
Similar with the example for tedium, 怠 at least has a base meaning you could associate with boredom and appears in compounds in Chinese like 怠倦 meaning listless and languid; 退's sense of decline and fade might also be stretched into the appropriate mood, and 屈 has the sense of suffering from something, so 怠屈 could be in "suffering from listlessness" territory.
Now, as is obvious, I know no Japanese at all and have never studied Chinese etymology beyond idle dictionary readings, but I'd be surprised if all the great Japanese scholars of classical Chinese and witty folk word-coiners who came after them just plumped on characters at random with only phonetic justifications. Say it ain't so, or tell me I'm projcting out of ignorance.
posted by Abiezer at 11:01 AM on April 24, 2007

Oh, there's no question that a lot of compounds came straight from Chinese. And your speculation on the origin of 馬鹿 is very interesting. I've got a whole glossary with thousands of four-character compounds that are (AFAIK) all Chinese. As you may know, back around year 800, being a literate Japanese meant that you could read Chinese, and that has informed the language as thoroughly as the Norman Invasion implanted French into English.

Of course, there are plenty of Japanese-made compounds, some of which use the same characters as Chinese ones but with hilariously different meanings, eg 手紙 (letter of correspondence vs toilet paper) or 無料 (free vs worthless), some of which have (I think) even been borrowed into Chinese, like 経済, which was a neologism invented by a Dutch-Japanese translator.
posted by adamrice at 11:54 AM on April 24, 2007

That last is a good point too; I was led to believe that a whole raft of modern social science words in Chinese were pinched from Japanese; 社会 for one iirc. The 手紙 confusion makes more sense if you ever see my handwriting.
posted by Abiezer at 12:03 PM on April 24, 2007

Thanks a lot, now I have some ideas about what it could mean and I've also learnt something about Chinese and Japanese sign languages in general. AskMe at it's best! It seems like it might be ugly but not totaly inappropriate then, except for the ignorant-illiterate-westerner-part.
posted by pica at 2:59 AM on April 25, 2007