Elizabeth 
DNSISNT SFIRT
SnoopJ
linksradikaler kampfläufer@SnoopJ @Elizafox @Daveography a latin professor at uni once showed us this. vspph, vphdph, vphcph, as julius cesar famously said
Sobtanian@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 😅
Ari [APz] Sovijärvi@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.
Jagna@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 😅
The Other Brook@Sobtanian @ilookloud @apzpins Ah, got it. I had the impression the hypothetical tattoo artist had written it left to right. At least they got one thing right.
@theotherbrook @ilookloud @apzpins I was tempted to write it backwards also but thought I’d give the tattoo artist a bit of kudos 😅