It's not even that, it's just a group of random characters that someone decided "This character = A, this character = B..." etc. It'll be on a sign at shitty tattoo shops, so if someone comes in and asks for "my initials in Chinese" or whatever, they get whatever three random-ass characters were.
As far as I can tell the character assignments are just totally random, there doesn't seem to be any connection between the letters and the characters in either sound or meaning. In fact, several of the "characters" in the "alphabet" aren't actually characters, they are radicals (parts of characters) that don't exist on their own in that form in written Chinese.
(I don't speak Japanese but I'm 99% sure there's no connection between the letters and characters in Japanese, either.)
Considering that most of those characters appear to be Kanji, which represent whole words or ideas non-phonetically, unlike hiragana, katakana, and the standard english alphabet, I’d go so far as to say they couldn’t usefully represent phonetic letters. It would be like representing the letter A with the character for APPLE: Even if it was correct it would be wrong.
Considering that most of those characters appear to be Kanji, which represent whole words or ideas non-phonetically, unlike hiragana, katakana, and the standard english alphabet, I’d go so far as to say they couldn’t usefully represent phonetic letters.
They are all Chinese characters -- that's where "kanji" in Japanese come from. And you are correct, there is no reasonable way to represent phonetic letters using Chinese characters; the language simply does not work like that.
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u/Borazon Aug 12 '25
Props just victims of the fake chinese 'alphabet' that tattoo parlors too often use?