Chop chop

[robotech_master]

As you know, I've been using this chop stamp as one of my user icons for quite a while. My uncle got it in a Chinatown somewhere. The characters under the name "Meadows" are in seal script, an ancient form of Chinese calligraphy no longer used much outside of official seals.

Lately, over on the Avatar Spirit forum, I came across a thread where a fellow was translating a lot of the signage and documents and other characters shown in Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I asked him for a translation of the stamp.

He wrote:

Wow, deciphering those characters was a challenge.

The characters written in modern traditional Chinese are 梅道, and they are pronounced Méi Dào.

梅 Méi means plum or prune, and is also a Chinese surname.
道 Dào means way or path.

So, fundamentally, it's about as close as you can get in Chinese to a phonetic pronunciation of "Meadows." Since these characters can be used to mean either the sound they make, or the words they actually mean, it doesn't have to make much more sense than that.

But still, I think of my Dad, who has had a prune cake on his birthday every year for as long as I can remember just because he likes prunes. So perhaps "the way of prunes" is not so wrong after all…

Comments

[frustratedpilot]

When my mother's first book was translated into Japanese the editors transliterated our surname to Biasu. From that, I decided to make the Asian version of the name 美朝 <- Bi-Asa <- "beautiful morning".

As for my given name, I found a site that will give a set of choices to work from phonetically. This worked out to 深和 <- Shen-Tian <- "deep peace"...though this would be pronounced fukabei if in Japanese.

I drive a Japanese-design car, and one little asperation I'd try, if I had the money, would be to doll it up like a Japanese Police Pato-chan and have the slogan 美朝深和 in very bold characters on the sides. We're all Blues Brothers fans here, so my folks would dig it.