Can Anyone Read Japanese ? (not Really Bonsai Related )

Rene_Voortwist

Hi,

I ordered a japanese seal stamp recently to use a s a sign on my drawings. It arrived today. They should have translated my surname ("voortwist") into japanese, but ofcourse I have no way of telling whether they did it correctly.. :-\
Here's a picture of the stamp. Can anyone verify this ?
Thanks in advance.

regards, René

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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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Paul

"Life will be sweet like a rhapsody
When I paint my materpiece"

TreeBay

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

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TreeBay

BTW, here are the Characters in less stylized forms if that helps. I found these images in a Chinese dictionary linked off a Japanese dictionary. Looks like there are additional meanings for each character in Chinese depending on how they are combined.

I should point out that this is only one way to write your name phonetically. There could conceivably be hundreds of ways.

The characters in black are the ones of concern. There is a lot of additional information that shows some usages of those characters.






Regards,

Matt

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Geodude

Exactly. That's why I thought there's some meaning behind the characters chosen. Using Matt's reading, we get "house that immediately dropped 18 liters." Hmmm....

As an example, John can be phonetically written to say "monkey hut" or "tranquil living." I prefer the latter.

The writing style for this chop IS interesting. As Matt said, usually katakana (Japanese) or seal script (Chinese) is used for chops.

__________________
Paul

"Life will be sweet like a rhapsody
When I paint my materpiece"

Rene_Voortwist

Matt,

Thanks for the explanation ! Wow I didn't expect all this information. Thank you for that !
So phonetically it should be allright... that's good.. I don't know about the "house that immediately dropped 18 liters" though..
:-\ but I guess "voortwist" IS a difficult name to translate. I send the person an MP3 file with the pronounciation of my name to make it a bit easier. I know that seal script is more common for stamps like this but I liked the kanji characters. maybe I will order a sealscript version aswell. I think that the translation is good enough to use it on my drawings though, and that was the main thing.

Paul,

I saw that you use stamps on your paintings too. ( stunning work by the way... ) Where were they made ?

regards, René