Quote:
Originally posted by Geodude
Rene,
I don't read Japanese, but these characters look Chinese to me. Did they tell you the meaning of the characters? Typically when they do this with western names (phonetic translation), they select characters with some beautiful meaning behind them. This is because one sound can have several meanings depending on how it's used and written.
I can tell you that the left two characters are phonetically similar to "s" and "t" in Chinese. First character doesn't really work, and the second character is difficult to read.
Let me know the meaning (if they told you) and I can do a better job for you.
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Japanese is written using vocabulary borrowed largely from Chinese. Most signature stamps HANKO are written using Chinese characters. Foreign names are typically written in katakana, which is a phonetic script. Using kanji like this is an interesting
Rather frequently the pronunciation in Japanese different than it would have been vs. the chinese character from which it was borrowed. In this case the four characters are part of the 2000 commonly used in the Japanese language. Most Japanese would be able to read the characters. The meaning might be subject to interpretation, though, and some characters have multiple meanings or pronounciations.
Since there is no V sound in Japanese, the similar sounding B might be used for example:
1. The first character in your stamp is pronounced "BO" and means "house or room" in the Chinese reading or "FUSA" in Japanese reading, which means a tuft or bunch (like a tuft of fur or grass. BO is a reasonable approximation to VOR. Japanese uses both the Chinese and native Japanese readings, so this is nto unusual.
2. The second character "TSUI" written this way means to drop or fall. It's a reasonable approximation of the TWI part of VOORTWIST.
3. The third character SU means "necessary or immediate" and it provides the S sound towards the end of your name.
4. The fourth character TO written like this is a unit volume of about 18 liters
So the combined name
BO-TSUI-SU-TO is actually phonetically very close to VOORTWIST.
Pronounciation of the same characters by a Chinese speaker might be entirely different than what we have here, but it could be rather similar for all I know.
Regards,
Matt