pink-marzipan: uglyneopets: blumalou: OH YEAH, GUYS! My dad found my family’s name in Chinese
pink-marzipan: uglyneopets: blumalou: OH YEAH, GUYS! My dad found my family’s name in Chinese hieroglyphs. I’m actually descended from a long line of ancient Aisha bowmen. not to be That Person but… “Chinese hieroglyphs”? this is actually a really common Chinese last name, and its romanization would be Zhang (sometimes Chang)… chinese doesn’t work in a way that you can directly translate a last name (it’s like saying you are translating Smith or Johnson into French–it doesn’t make sense). The most you can do with “translating” a name into chinese is to do so phonetically. if your family name is Zhang, then yes this is your last name written in traditional chinese, but it doesn’t sound like it based on your post… this is not some ancient “chinese hierogylph”, this is literally one of the most common chinese last names and a character written in traditional chinese Yea, I wouldn’t refer to them as hieroglyphs… that’s more exclusively commonly* a term for Egyptian writing than Chinese. For Chinese it’s usually logograms or pictograms from my experience. But yea the character on the left is the pictogram while the one on the right is the modern day script, and 張 does mean stretch/ bow in some contexts (although I think it’s not really used as bow in modern Chinese? still can mean stretch though, like 張開 = (stretch) open) ah okay, I didn’t realize that the left one is a pictograph, I only recognized the modern chinese character, which is why i was so baffled by the use of the term “hieroglyph”. either way, it is the character for zhang which isn’t a translation/equivalent of any western last name so i was just like ??? about claims that this is someone’s (presumably) western last name in chinese -- source link