Thread: What are you working on?

Originally Posted by pixelfixed

Laser engraved Ivory,translates to Kamisori in Katakana.

No, it doesn't. What is literally says is

Ki ya ma i zo o i

To write it in katakana, you'd write カミソリ but since it's a native Japanese word, you'd typically use hiragana in which case it would be written as かみそり

Originally Posted by Bruno

No, it doesn't. What is literally says is

Ki ya ma i zo o i

To write it in katakana, you'd write カミソリ but since it's a native Japanese word, you'd typically use hiragana in which case it would be written as かみそり

If you say so bruno,they were laser engraved in Japan,would assume they knew what they were doing.

Originally Posted by pixelfixed

If you say so bruno,they were laser engraved in Japan,would assume they knew what they were doing.

Even if they are engraved in Japan, that doesn't mean that what is on there translates to Japanese.

In Japanese language, there are no individual letters. There are phonems. You can have 'ka' and 'mi', but not individual 'k' 'a' 'm' and 'i'.
Kamisori is written using only 4 characters. However, it gets tricky when writing foreign words in Japanese. Foreign words cannot transliterated directly. For example, the name 'filip' cannot be written in Japanese. They would typically write fu i ri pu or something else. There are no hard rules, it's more of coming up with a combination of phonems that sounds more or less like what they think it woiuld sound like in your language.

What is on that engraving, is more or less what you could expect from someone who had to write out 'kamisori', assuming it was an English word. That's also why katakana is used instead of hiragana. If they had written the Japanese word kamisori, they would likely have used hiragan (unless you specified katakana) and used 4 characters. Instead, they spelled what they thought 'kamisori' would sounds like as an english word.

Bruno, english being my native language, I have no clue what it says other than what I have been told,but thanks for the info.
I cut and polish the Ivory,I send it to a collectors brother in san francisco,He in turn sends it to his brother in Japan to be engraved than sends it back to his brother In SFO, who in turn sends it to me,I make the the Box and effix the engraved Plaque and return to SFO.
The collector in Japan has been buying Razor Boxes from me for ten yrs, if he is wrong, so be it.

Yeah I'm not saying this to be a smart ass or anything. It's just that someone might see the picture, and say to himself 'so this is how kamisori is written' and copy it on his design without checking. At least it's not a tattoo. My sensei once was in a tight spot because he looked at a tattoo of a biker at a metal concert. The guy says', wow so you can read this? And he says 'Yes'. And then he turned his head sideways and sais 'but why is that one upside down?'. The biker was not amused but in the end his mates agreed that it was not my sensei's fault that the guy had an upside down tattoo on his arm.

Btw, just to be sure, I sent this picture to my sensei. He's fluent in Japanese, studied Japanology at university.
I'll post back when I hear from him.

About 10 years ago someone put out a sheet of commercial tattoo 'flash' (designs) of "Write Your Name In Kanji". A lot of shops picked up on this, including the one I used to be in. The sheet printed American names in alphabetical order with the corresponding Kanji next to it. What we found out was that the "spelling" was phonetic. IOW, if someone read the kanji, pronouncing it correctly, the sound was similar, if not the same, as the American name. The kanji itself bore no relation to the name as far as the meaning went. I think that is the same as what Bruno is talking about.

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

About 10 years ago someone put out a sheet of commercial tattoo 'flash' (designs) of "Write Your Name In Kanji". A lot of shops picked up on this, including the one I used to be in. The sheet printed American names in alphabetical order with the corresponding Kanji next to it. What we found out was that the "spelling" was phonetic. IOW, if someone read the kanji, pronouncing it correctly, the sound was similar, if not the same, as the American name. The kanji itself bore no relation to the name as far as the meaning went. I think that is the same as what Bruno is talking about.

Similar.

When looking at kanji, most of them have fairly short pronunciations. for example, river, thousand, world, previous, line, ship, .... are all 'sen'. If someone asks, what does 'sen' mean, well, that depends on how it is used. Only when kanji are put together (in a valid way) do they get specific meaning. Put sen and sei together, and you will get the word sensei which has a specific meaning, and which is made up from 2 kanji that have a pronunciation that is the same as dozens of other kanji. And even singular kanji can have many very different meanings.

I've once seen the kanji chart you are talking about, and indeed, from a Japanese language pov, they're meaningless.

In this case about kamisori, the reverse has happened. The Japanese person who ended up spelling the word did not say 'what does this Japanese word mean and how do I write it down'. Instead he took the katakana chart, and said 'how do I write down this English word in Japanese, using this table of characters as a guide. And looking at the word, my guess is that the word was (assumed to be) pronounced by an american, the way you would pronounce it if it was an English word (which would more or less be 'kay me zoo ri').

The 'a' from ka is proncounced flat, like the 'a' in applause. Mi is indeed pronounced me, but very short. the 'so' is proncounced as in 'sorry'. and then the 'ri' is pronouced as in 're'ward, and also very short.

Just about finished with this Puma hohl restore. Blade came out well. Made up the
scales with a plastic set and pinned her up. Did not have the rubber original piece
on the tang so sorted one out of electrical sticky tape and overcame the sticky with
a couple of coats of gorilla super glue which sealed it perfectly much to my surprise.
She will get some time on the hones this afternoon. Beautiful afternoon here and time
for a cigar.

Looks great,shrink tubing gives a nice clean look also in place of the rubber gizzie.