Saturday, April 29, 2006

From Istanbul with Gibberish

The downloadable gibberish “Asian font” has finally reached the country of Turkey.

A recent posting in BMEzine’s gallery titled “Art by Vaso” displays this piece of gem:


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A60421/high/bmegl258969.jpg

Reader U.A. from Istanbul has also sent me these two photos:

car_japanflaghangul

Despite all the recent frictions between South Korea and Japan, it is nice to see a Japanese flag sharing the same piece of windshield in harmony with Korean Hangul.

vase_istanbul_turkey

"Asian theme" flower vase with gibberish characters.


17 comments:

  1. Hopefully his arm hair will eventually obscure the tatoo.

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  2. The vase in the back looks like it was trying to say 日本文, but the characters are in the wrong order, and at least one stroke is missing.

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  3. I'm just wondering if the Hangul actually says anything, like "Source of our problems".

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  4. I asked two Korean buddies about the car. They said:

    The Hangul sound like "Bak Ku Pal Uh Ra"

    Bak Ku sounds like "receive"

    Pal Uh Ra sounds like "sell please"

    But the Hangul still isn't clear to them.

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  5. i think the front vase is meant to be 木華花

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  6. The Korean text in Unicode is 바구 팔오라., which in Revised Romanization would be "Bagu parora" (I'm guessing where to put the space.)

    I don't know Korean very well, so I can't make much sense of it other than the "please sell" part that Peng already mentioned. Bagu appears to be a Korean shopping site, but that's probably neither here nor there.

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  7. Tian, great blog and I think the newspaper coverage (mid April 2006) was a little overdue. Just curious, how did you manage to collate all these photos of tattoos? Are these from volunteers? I happened to chance by your blog when doing a research for my course blog on 'Fusion' or this whole idea of East meet West. And I think the use and misuse of language provides a window to such cross-cultural exchanges.

    I tracked back earlier to your April entry, it didn't appear on blogspot possibly because of the difference in platforms - I'm on wordpress.

    If you have the time to spare, it will be great to hear some of your views on hybridisation of languages on some of my blog entry:

    http://raws.adc.rmit.edu.au/~s3090325/blog2/?p=35

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  8. fuji,

    Some of the photos were taken by myself, and the others are from email submissions and Shannon Larrett's BMEzine.com.

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  9. Yes, the Korean is complete gibberish, all the more humorous being with the Japanese flag.

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  10. Well, we threw up a link on my site, let's see if any of my readers can figure it out.

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  11. I'm wondering if the Hangul is an attempt at transliterating some Turkish word. I don't know a whole lot of Turkish, but the suffix "lar" is a plural marker. So maybe it's like, the plural of something sounding like "bakupa"? Whatever that would mean...

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  12. I'm Turkish myself and there's no word like Bakupa in Turkish..Well there's Parora, which sounds similar like "Parola" (password, motto)...if I squeeze that too much that could be "Bak, parola" (look, a motto) but...well, too absurd.

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  13. Hahahahahaha.

    That Korean definitely doesn't mean anything. I don't really think you could squeeze any sort of sense out of that phrase. Although the third character means "arm".

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  14. I wouldn't know if Ba Gu Pal Oh Ra means something in a different language, but it doesn't make much sense in Korean. Maybe the middle three characters are numbers?

    구 - 九 - 9?
    팔 - 八- 8?
    오 - 五 - 5?

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  15. Luv your blog! As a lover of japanese culture and a learner of japanese language, it provided me loads of laughs!
    For christmas, my sister in law, knowing that above, gave me a set of teacups with 牛 written on it... I had to get a grip on myself not to laugh too much... at least I can use them to drink milk, and maybe it won't get too far from the meaning.

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  16. 牛 (cow) probably was meant for Chinese horoscope-the year of the cow. Though the correct character for the horoscope is 丑, but the other is also frequently used. good present for a person born in such a year. Mine for instance (1977) is 蛇 (snake)

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  17. So am I correctly "translating" the gibberish tattoo as "PRENSES", using the newly-uncovered "asian font" key?

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