DNSISNT SFIRT
@Elizafox @Daveography reminds me of the classic "msmsptth mthrf" tattoo
@SnoopJ @Elizafox @Daveography a latin professor at uni once showed us this. vspph, vphdph, vphcph, as julius cesar famously said

@kaffeehaeferl @SnoopJ @Elizafox @Daveography @Illuminatus

Slightly related: we see this in Arabic all the time. It mostly comes from the fact that the people making the tattoos can read the Arabic alphabet but don’t understand what it means, or how to join the letters.

The worst offenders are Arabic letters not joined up and written left to right 😅

@Sobtanian A Nordic favorite is also when letters like ä, ö, å are used in place of similarly looting letters to make it more cool.
@apzpins @Sobtanian yeah all the not-Nordic bands with names written like that because aesthetics 😆 if my bf says it looks cool I will usually start pronouncing the *aesthetic* letters as I would in Swedish in an otherwise Polish or English word
@ilookloud @apzpins I’m assuming the letters sound very different to what people think they do?

@Sobtanian @apzpins most of the time they get pronounced the way they would were they without diacritics or other visual transformations, for example "ø" is pronounced the way "o" would in the target language.

These letters' pronunciations vary between languages, for example the "ä" in Swedish and German denote different acoustic characteristics and behave differently in regard to neighboring letters. These are just letters (graphemes) not sounds (phonemes).

Also, general assumptions about the sound of different languages are often incorrect, Swedish "Göteborg" being a nice example.

(I'm simplyfing some concepts for the sake of legibility)

@ilookloud @apzpins I see.

In Arabic, vowel sounds are not letters but various marks above and below letters, these are generally not written down because you know what the sound is just by recognising the letters and what word they make.

Most tattoo artists don’t know that (because most aren’t Arabs) so you’ll see someone called Jenny who has her name in Arabic, it should be جني (jne) but it’ll be done like جيني (jene) which is pronounced genie.

If it’s really bad, the letters won’t even be joined up (all of Arabic is joined up) so ج ي ن ي which is the equivalent of tattooing J E N E and claiming it says your name 😅

@Sobtanian At least in Finnish the ä and a are different letters, not accents, so replacing an ä with an a is just as legit as replacing an x with a k because they kinda sorta look alike.

But that one letter replacement will absolutely change the meaning of words. The classic example being "näin" = "I saw" and "nain" = "I married" or "I fucked" in casual language.

Now imagine telling you saw your all your friends this weekend and then drop the ä dots.

@apzpins sounds like a good weekend.
@apzpins i am guilty of this for names in World of Warcraft when the name is already taken 🙈
@apzpins @Sobtanian we always pronounced "Stargåte" the Swedish way for fun. (Approximately star-gaw-tay)
@titia The "Stargote" seems to be pretty well spread take in the Nordics.
@apzpins no surprise there 🙂

@apzpins @Sobtanian

How about the clothes' label "Napapijri"? It is the Finnish word for Arctic Circle, with one letter swapped for another for no good reason.
And then it has the flag of Norway.

@Tuuktuuk It seems to be a Swiss company doing Nordic weeaboo. No surprise they just smashed everything Nordic together and it was as authentic to their customer base as the tattoos in Kanji that say absurd things.
@Tuuktuuk @apzpins cultural appropriation.