Chop translation

[asterroc]

I have a Chinese chop, in traditional characters. It is possible that it contains my name in Chinese (Szu Sung-Eh), or it could be something else entirely ("licensed prostitute"). I can no longer write my Chinese name, but I think I would recognize it if hand written, and certainly the last symbol doesn't look like anything I recognize (that and my name is three parts, not four).

Below the cut are images of the stamp/print, and the chop itself. Click for bigger.


Print


Chop (since it is a stamp, it is backwards of how it prints)



If you know what it says, please enlighten me.

Edit: A mirror image of the chop and further discussion can be found here.

Comments

[sirroxton.livejournal.com]

A long time ago, I had one of those made at a tourist shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. I asked what it said. The kid at the counter conferred with the stamp maker, returned and said "Adam Agoosahdah." My companion, who had been raised by Chinese immigrants, later told me that the stamp maker had simply told the kid to "say his name, you idiot." I suppose I should have asked what it meant, not what it said. =)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I am under the impression this was given to me by my Nga Boo (Shanghai word for maternal grandmother) when I was a teenager, so I am hopeful it really does means something. :-P Plus framefolly has been trying to figure out my Chinese name recently from my poor memory of the "correct" (original Shanghai) way to pronounce it and its meaning, so I'm even more hopeful this chop and that puzzle will collide and solve each other.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

I have asked two coworkers who are native chinese readers. One has already told me that he can't tell what it says, if anything.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks for the effort! :) Do they know, is this traditional Chinese, or some other stylized or historical Chinese? It certainly doesn't look like simplified Chinese to me.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

My guess would be simplified Chinese, but my Mandarin, such as it was, is about 25 years (urk!) stale at this point. I could maybe ask a couple of friends at work.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

One coworker said "I will have to puzzle that out. It is in an old font that they use for chops. I don't have time right now, I am working on $REALJOB I will have to trace the stamp and reverse it, the image isn't too clear."

I traced and mirrored the chop for him, lets see what he says.

Traced Chop

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I haven't gotten the chance yet to dig out my image manipulation software and just mirror image the original chop itself. That might be more readable than a mirror image of a tracing.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

So I asked one of my friends at work, who grew up in mainland China. To her it looks like these characters are very old; they're not using the standard components. (E.g. the character in the lower right, the bottom-right component in the character in the upper right, the top component in the character in the bottom left.)

Based on that (and on the similar comment above), you may have to go to an actual scholar of historical Chinese writing in order to get anywhere with this. If you do, I'd be interested in finding out what you learn.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I've emailed another friend whose mother usually manages to puzzle out the most obscure things, so maybe they'll pipe up here or if not I'll post it if they email me back. She's not a scholar though, just highly literate, so it may be she doesn't know either, and I'll have to keep hunting.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

You have apparently presented an interesting challenge to my friend. The character set is "old man", a very old style. And it is poorly drawn, some of the characters are sideways.

The last character is basically just means "this is a chop".

The first three might be a transcription (in the linguistic sense) of your name in English with similar sounding words in Mandarin. Is your name something like "Suzanne"? But as a Mandarin phrase it seems to mean nothing.

He is still trying to puzzle it out.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Interesting! It may actually be a transliteration of my Chinese (Shanghai) name into "old man". I prefer to write my Chinese name in English as "Su Sung-Eh", but another possible English transliteration of it might be "Tsu Zong-Ah". (I do not actually know any of the official accepted ways of writing Chinese words in English, so I'm just going based upon what they sound like to me.) Point is, my actual Chinese name may be consistent with the "Suzanne" you mention this chop as apparently sounding like phonetically. (Suzanne is not my actual name.) The "Su/Tsu" is a transliteration into Shanghai of my actual family name (the name is Jewish in origin), and the "Sung-Eh" or "Zong-Ah" is Shanghai for "heart and liver (literal) / heart and soul (figurative)". It is my understanding that Shanghai is very similar to Mandarin.

Please pass this on to your friend in case it helps. I'm glad he's enjoying the challenge. :)

[framefolly.livejournal.com]

Hi! I've been on a cruise for a week, out of touch completely.

The chop characters are typical -- they use an ancient font that practically nobody reads today (there are 6 traditional fonts that have been passed down, some thousands of years old, and only about 2.5 are still in circulation). Even though I'm highly literate in Chinese, I have no hope of figuring out your name from the chop.

Your transliteration -- "Su Sung-Eh" and "Tsu Zong-Ah" -- don't use either the pinyin or the Wade-Giles system, AND they refer to Shanghainese pronunciations, so I can't help.

Sorry -- the mystery persists!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've never learned the official systems rather than my own transliteration attempt. (How is it that "Beijing" and "Peking" are the same word?!) But from what galbinus_caeli's coworker, and a coworker of another friend have told me, it does seem like a transliteration (from modern Shanghai into this old chop font) of my Shanghai name. The other friend is asking his mother tonight, so there's a chance she'll have more, but I'm becoming doubtful.

So when it comes to written Chinese, what do you mean by "fonts"? Are traditional and simplified Chinese just different fonts? Is there really an exact 1-to-1 correlation between words/grammar in this "chop font" and modern simplified Chinese, and both of them would be read aloud identically?

[framefolly.livejournal.com]

"Beijing" uses the pinyin system; "Peking" is left over from when Westerners and Chinese people started to have a lot of contact over a hundred years ago. It doesn't follow a consistent system; neither do common transliterations such as Canton, Hong Kong, Taipei, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen etc. But because these transliterations have been in circulation for so long, and because they sometimes have historical significance, we still use the less standard versions.

The story of Chinese "fonts" is long and involved, and I only know the bare basics. I refer you to the wikipedia article on Chinese characters for a gloss -- it's a bit long and doesn't focus on what you're asking about, but it can be a place to start.

As for traditional and simplified, yes, you could consider them to be just different fonts. The characters within the different fonts sometimes have a 1-to-1 correlation and sometimes don't with each other, depending on historical context. For example, most of the characters that are found on the ancient oracle bones (3000 years ago) are no longer used. However, a few have evolved into characters that we still use today; they just look different (but you can still see the evolution clearly when you look at the intermediate fonts). And we have no idea how speakers then actually pronounced those words. In the present day, simplified Chinese was promoted in the 50s in Communist China as an attempt to raise literacy. It took many traditional characters and simplified them. A character that might have required 15 strokes might now only require 7. Some of these simplifications resulted in the same character. So two characters that are written differently in the traditional font -- behind and queen, for example -- are written using the same character in the simplified font. So I suppose that's not a 1-1 ratio, because without context, you wouldn't know if this character refers to a queen or being behind something.

Your chop font is almost certainly a form of 篆书, which seems to have been standardized during the reign of the First Emperor (200 BCE or so). Names are generally semi-rare characters that are still in use but aren't going to be everywhere (to prevent the equivalent of having 100 "John Lee"s in a city, for example). My family name is well known (yours might not be, since it's a transliteration), the first character of my given name is common, but the final character of my given name is a historical variant of the character that is now in common use to mean "tranquil." Some Chinese people have to ask me how to pronounce my name, and this is not an odd thing to happen in general.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Man, now I want to learn Pinyin - will I learn it if I ever take Mandarin? Looking at the Wikipedia page on Pinyin, I think my name could be (placing each syllable on a different line, initials and finals with a space between them, and a / when I'm not sure which of multiple sounds/tones/ways of writing it is) as follows.

X ú
Z/C àng/ang
é/ē/ê

I'm confused about the usage of "ê" versus other E-type sounds, and my recollection of how to say my Shanghai name doesn't seem to exactly fit the Pinyin options, and I don't know how much of that is because it's Shanghai and not Mandarin, how much is because I never learned the Shanghai well in the first place, and how much is that I don't remember it well even if I did learn it well.

[framefolly.livejournal.com]

Yes, if you take Mandarin, you will certainly learn pinyin. I think your guesses are good, but again, without the written characters (in a modern font), it's still guesswork...

Shanghai-nese sounds pretty different from Mandarin to my ears -- then again, I tend to exaggerate the differences between languages I understand and languages I don't understand.