please help, anyone know Chinese symbols pic included

[puffthemagicdragon]

hi, The symbol or word is etched in wood, you have to look close to see it. any help on what this means is GREATLY appreciated. thanks in advance! I have it uploaded to andale and you can see it by clicking on the link.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. The only Chinese character I recognize is 'tea'.

[BlooInBloo]

3. Um, is *that* 'tea'? (I don't know any, so your statement doesn't help)

[puffthemagicdragon]

4. thnks

thanks for your reply but I think it is more than that and any help will help. Someone wrote it on my door last night and I am freaked out!

[Kelly Rupert]

11. Yes, and this looks nothing like "tea."

[Matsubara]

2. It's the character for "husband"

"otto" in Japanese, don't know how it's pronounced in Chinese.

[Matsubara]

6. It could POSSIBLY be "heaven"

But I don't think so. The vertical strokes that make up the upside-down V shape should not go beyond the top horizontal line for "heaven", so "husband" is more likely.

Either way, I would not take this as a personal message, but rather somebody bored and doodling. Nothing menacing there.

[Kelly Rupert]

13. Yeah, but let's not be assuming the writer

knows anything about stroke order or composition. The vertical stroke doesn't go nearly far enough for "husband," and the higher of the two horizontal strokes is wider than the lower, which is just weird-looking. I'd guess it's "without," if it had to be anything.

无, if DU can display unicode Chinese characters.

[mistertrickster]

24. Yup, that's what I thought too "tien" as in "tien an men" square

Heaven's Gate Square in Beijing where the uprising was crushed in 1989.

[TahitiNut]

22. Yep. Based on 'hito' I think.

'Hito' is one of the few kanji I recognize.

Could it be "loser"? (shitsu)

[puffthemagicdragon]

5. someone wrote it on my door last night

I am freaked out...dont think it is tea or husband

[blondeatlast]

7. Googled "husband, chinese character" came up with this.

Since you won't believe the poster above.

http://chineseculture.about.com/library/character/bl_zi00074.htm
http://chineseculture.about.com/library/symbol/blcc_husband.htm

[Matsubara]

10. I've been living in Japan, studying language for 13 years...

I also work as a translator.

I wouldn't steer you wrong.

Nothing to freak about.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

17. Off point question. Are, Chinese and Japanese characters somewhat interchangeable?

I recall hearing in some class I took many years ago.

Also, I envy you living in Japan. Spent a year there in the military and loved it.

[Kelly Rupert]

19. Somewhat, yeah.

I have a fair degree of fluency in Chinese (studied for five years, then lived there for a year) and I can usually hack my way through written Japanese (after having spent a semester studying it to learn the fundamentals of grammar and grammatical particles).

The individual characters are usually written the exact same way, and often have very similar meanings. However, spoken Japanese is literally closer to Turkish than it is to Chinese, so don't go thinking they're related at all. Instead, the Japanese simply imported the Chinese writing system via Korea, and then over the centuries adopted it to their own language.

Right now, Japanese has three "systems" of writing, as it were. There's the Kanji, which are Chinese characters, and which usually bear similar meanings. There are often significant differences, but usually you can figure out the intent. Those are usually mutually intelligible, and often interchangable. In Chinese, that's all the writing there is. In Japanese, these are usually noun, adjective, and verb stems. Then there are two syllabaries, called hiragana and katakana; usually used for grammatical functions, these are a phonetic representation of spoken Japanese, and are totally incomprehensible to a Chinese speaker.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

20. That's what I heard. That the spoken languages are indipherable to each other.

But, that Japanese could read Chinese and vice-versa. My Japanese is limited to the usage usually employed by 18 year old GI's in foreign countries and have to do with women, booze, and prices.

[Kelly Rupert]

21. From personal experience,

fluency in one of the languages grants survival ability in the other language and no more. You can easily manage to navigate signage, menus, basic statements, etc., etc. Grammar is totally beyond you, but you can identify the meaning of the main nouns and verbs, if not the tense or aspect, and complex relationships between concepts is lost.

Chinese can read Japanese characters and vice versa. Chinese can sort of hack through Japanese sentences, and vice versa.

[Matsubara]

28. Yes.

I would add that although Japanese "borrows" thousands of Chinese characters, there are only about 2,000 that are commonly used, whereas there tens of thousands in use in written Chinese.

Also, over the years, Japan has simplified some of the characters, while China has stuck with the original model.

I don't envy you learning Chinese, as it is much more complex than Japnese.

There are only about 50 sounds that can be made in Japanese (with a few additional blended sounds created by combining two kana), so it's very easy to pronounce, whereas Chinese has a much more complex system of intonation. Also, learning all those character, just to be able to read a newspaper - that's a chore! Ohe yeah, then there is the whole Mandarin/Cantonese thing...

I can read most of the Joyo kanji, and of course the Kana, but Chinese - fageddaboutit. Kudos to you on your efforts.

[Mabus]

8. You might be able to look it up yourself at this link

http://zhongwen.com/zi.htm

btw, here is definition for "husband" http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl?word=husband&searchtype=english&where=whole

[Kelly Rupert]

9. If that's supposed to be Chinese,

then the writer ought be ashamed of his/herself. That is the worst writing I've ever seen. It bears more resemblance to a random assortment of lines than it does to any character, and it's obvious that whoever wrote it doesn't know a lick of Chinese.

It might be "sky/heaven," pronounced "tian." (That's my bet, it's a common character to find written on bits of crass imitations of Chinese "culture" designed for American consumption.) It might be an old term for "husband," pronounced "fu." It looks a lot like "without," pronounced "wu;" that bit on the bottom-right fits that, while not husband or sky. But it doesn't really look like any. It just looks like lines.

It's atrocious, is what it is.

For reference, the chars are 天， 夫 and 无 respectively.

[puffthemagicdragon]

12. is it possible it is another language?

maybe it is another language

[Kelly Rupert]

14. Not likely at all.

The only languages that, when written, look anything like that (and bear absolutely no mutual intelligibility with Chinese) are long dead.

[mistertrickster]

27. Good post, Kelly. I lived in China and Japan and have dabbled

in learning the characters for years. That was my first impression too--"the writer is awfully sloppy." Impossible to know what it means from that single character . . .

[Rabrrrrrr]

15. It could be "adult", but the writing sucks

So, who knows?

[Kelly Rupert]

16. Which one?

I can't think of any Chinese word meaning "adult" that looks anything like that.

[Rabrrrrrr]

18. I see now it could be husband. I was going purely on memory

of a few characters that I actually recognize, sort of.

I don't know Chinese or Japanese at all, just a few characters, and that one was familiar.

:7

[1monster]

23. This is the Chinese character for Heaven... looks similar to me.

[ixat]

25. Allow me

I speak Chinese, and this symbol, depending on whether one of the vertical strokes is meant to protrude over the top horizontal stroke, could be one of two characters: "fu", which means "person" or "husband", or "tian", which means "sky." I believe it's the latter.

[lpbk2713]

26. It means ....

I just drove into a telephone pole and be careful because the lines are down. :eyes:




(Not really) :eyes:

[mistertrickster]

29. I wonder . . . maybe it's not a character at all . . . maybe it's a combination

of letters, a gang sign or even a graphic picture . . .

[EnviroBat]

30. Karma.