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sravaka -> RE: Chinese Symbol for Slave (11/24/2008 8:15:33 PM)
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quote:
That's not wrong, but it's written in simplified Chinese, and it's not what I'd choose anyway. There are many different ways of saying "slave," and that combination applies historically to people who became government slaves by being convicted of a crime. That's hardly what we mean by "slave" in the BDSM world. (This will be news to people who know Japanese but not Chinese, since the original connotations of the Chinese word are largely lost in the Japanese equivalent, i.e. dorei.)
The "dorei" (not simplified) combination in Japanese is, according to the Japanese equivalent of the OED, a modern translation from the English word slave. In Japanese the first character was originally applied to a word whose meaning over time has ranged from slave conscripted for labor, to servant, to underling, to retainer or courtier, to a humble first person pronoun, and so on.
::shrug:: For what it's worth.
I wonder what the attraction is of kanji tattoos for people who don't actually read kanji? I suspect it's related to the pictographic fallacy that Lordandmaster references above, but would be curious to hear first person reports.
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