Parsing of a fated kin tattoo
« previous post | next post »
It's been a while since I've written about Chinese tattoos, although years ago they used to be a staple subcategory of our Chinglish-themed posts.
This intriguing one is too good to pass up:
The bearer / wearer of this striking tattoo is the famous French (of partial Cameroonian extraction) professional rugby player Romain Ntamack (b. 1999). One photo is from his Facebook; the other one (the clearer one) is from the web.
The vertical sinographic tattoo on his left flank says:
zhùdìngde qīnqī 注定的 亲戚
("destined relatives; predestined family; fated kin")
I showed the tattoos to about half-a-dozen native speakers of Chinese, all of whom have graduate degrees in the Chinese humanities. None of them said outright that the phrase is grammatically incorrect, but they all said that it sounds unusual, that it doesn't seem like a natural Chinese expression.
None of them felt confident trying to come up with the correct interpretation of what Romain Ntamack wanted inscribed on his flank for the rest of his life. However, the majority said they think he meant something like "destiny is relative", and Chinese social media said the same thing.
Some of my informants said that foreigners usually know what they want their tattoo to say, and that they typically ask GT or other machine translator or the tattooist (if he knows Chinese) to turn the English into Chinese.
I interpreted the five characters as above as soon as I saw them: "destined relatives; predestined family; fated kin". Interestingly, all the machine translators I consulted interpreted the phrase exactly the way I did on first glance.
I cannot explain Romain's personal reason for sporting that particular tattoo, but I am deeply struck by one aspect of it. Namely, it displays an extraordinary command of Mandarin grammar. Notice the space between the modifier zhùdìngde 注定的 ("destined") and the noun qīnqī 亲戚 ("relative").
This is something I have long advocated for sinographic writing, because, without proper word parsing, there are many places in Chinese written texts that are ambiguous or confusing. Use of what is called fēncí liánxiě 分詞連寫 / 分词连写 ("word segmentation and linking") increases the amount of clarity in Chinese texts considerably. Often one may not know where one word ends and another begins. Correct parsing also helps with the understanding of the grammar and syntax of sentences.
Skeptics may say that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, and that you don't need to know where words begin and end nor how to link syllables / morphemes correctly. Nevertheless, in half a century of correcting papers and reviewing translations, I can say with confidence that a goodly majority of errors in understanding Chinese passages is due to misdetermination of word boundaries and grammar attachment.
I have no idea who is responsible for that beautiful space between the adjective zhùdìngde 注定的 ("destined") and the noun qīnqī 亲戚 ("relative"), whether it be the tattooist, the tattooed, or a learned friend. Whoever it was, my hat's off to him / her.
Oh, additionally, the characters are elegantly executed, and they are neither upside down nor backward.
Selected readings
- "Hooked on pot" (7/9/13) — four large, exquisitely inscribed characters on the right flank of a person
- "Massachusetts is red(-faced)" (6/5/09)
- "Queen of the World" (3/10/12) — featuring one character that is upside down and backward
- "Tattoos as a means of communication" (9/1/12) — tattoos and the origin of writing
[Thanks to Kerts Deffle, Jing Hu, Xinyi Ye, Zhengyuan Zhang, Diana Shuheng Zhang, and Zhang He.]
JPL said,
November 30, 2025 @ 2:14 am
Even the English interpretations that you and the others came up with in spontaneous agreement, I don't know what they mean. So far the English expressions apply to everybody, relative to whatever future events they are eventually actors in, until you specify the particular events that are the ultimate goal. "As a young man he was described as a man of destiny; sadly, he was destined only to fail.", began the novel. Do the Chinese expressions have a similar problem?
AntC said,
November 30, 2025 @ 4:21 am
Although of Cameroonian extraction, Ntamack was born in Toulouse; presumably his first language is French. Is there a French phrase this might be a translation from?
His father also is an (ex-)French national player; his brother is a professional, as is an uncle. So something about rugby being in the blood? Le rugby, c'est moi. (Perhaps the Chinese characters for rugby were too hard for the tattooist.)
AntC said,
November 30, 2025 @ 5:00 am
It's bemusing listening to English language rugby commentators trying to pronounce his surname. Variously between nnnn-tamack to inter-mack.
That first consonant is presumably some sort of cluster? So the name should be two syllables. (Wikip says ~250 indigenous languages in the country. Plenty of names starting mb- or ng-; I can't find another nt-)
Romain is, by the way, a scintillating rugby player.
CCH said,
November 30, 2025 @ 5:17 am
I wonder if this is an attempt to translate the phrase "chosen family"?
DJL said,
November 30, 2025 @ 6:59 am
Ntamack Sr introduces himself in this video (at time 8 sec):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fd1sS1-5Cw
Chris Button said,
November 30, 2025 @ 8:52 am
Perhaps 注定的 and 亲戚 aren't supposed to be associated?
As for the pronunciation of his name, I always find cases where the stop in the prenasalized stop is voiceless (unlike in say mb- in Mbappé) to be very interesting phonetically. I'd go with [ⁿ̥t] (the nasal being voiceless [n̥])
Victor Mair said,
November 30, 2025 @ 9:22 am
@CCH:
Excellent suggestion!
There was a film by that name.
Many of the Chinese translations of "chosen family" that I find on line have dìng 定 ("fixed; settled; determined; certain"; etc., etc.) in the position of the second morpheme.
———-
The French translation for "chosen family" is "la famille choisie". Other possible translations include "famille de cœur" (family of the heart) or "famille de choix" (family of choice), according to Reverso English Dictionary.
La famille choisie: This is the most direct and widely understood translation.
Famille de cœur: This is a more poetic way to express the idea, emphasizing the emotional bonds.
Famille de choix: This is another accurate translation, highlighting that the family was "chosen".
CHOSEN FAMILY – Definition & Meaning – Reverso English Dictionary
View all translations of chosen family * French:famille choisie, de cœur, … * German:Wahlfamilie, gewählte Familie, … * Italia…
Reverso English Dictionary
What is ""la famille choisie"" in American English and … – Drops
la famille choisie-chosen family.svg. Start free trial now! Go fluent! Not … Learn French · Learn German · Learn Greek · Learn H…
Language Drops
Traduction de "chosen family" en français – Reverso Context
Every weekend, my chosen family meets for dinner and laughter. Chaque week-end, ma famille choisie se réunit pour dîner et rire.
Reverso Context
CHOSEN FAMILY – Translation in French – bab.la
Similar translations for "chosen family" in French. family noun. French. famille. family adjective. French. familial. chosen verb.
Bab.la – loving languages
{AIO)
———-
Victor Mair said,
November 30, 2025 @ 9:25 am
Emile and Romain both look like perfect rugby players.
Victor Mair said,
November 30, 2025 @ 10:04 am
@DJL
I love love love the way Êmile Ntamack pronounces his name and then, with a big, beatific, handsome smile, triumphantly claps / smacks his hands.
"rugby école de la vie"
Thank you for giving me the chance to experience ce beau moment!
VVOV said,
November 30, 2025 @ 2:01 pm
I also immediately thought of “chosen family”, which is a somewhat commonly referenced concept in US queer/LGBT communities, but not sure whether it (or a French or other language equivalent) would be on this football player’s radar.
AntC said,
November 30, 2025 @ 3:53 pm
Thanks @ChrisB. Further (dubious) gHits claim he's of Basaa stock, a Bantu language.
Then I guess his name starts with the prenasal Coronal given as [ⁿd] on that chart. (Lucky for the commentators it's not the implosive [ɓ].)
katarina said,
November 30, 2025 @ 5:01 pm
Victor Mair: "that beautiful space between the adjective … and the noun…"
These are striking and moving words. Has it ever occurred to you that the humble space between an adjective and a noun could be a thing of beauty and an object of affection? But it is for Prof. Mair who comes to this appreciation from fifty years of teaching Chinese and reviewing translations, and of advocating a space between two written Chinese words for grammatical clarity. Beauty lies here in the eye of the cognoscente.
Chris Button said,
November 30, 2025 @ 5:11 pm
@ AntC
That figures since it looks like voiced d- is only possible when prenasalized. So, "nt" then would have to be [ⁿd], which is more likely phonetically than [ⁿ̥t]. My kids' middle names are Bantoid, albeit not Basaa, and include [ᶮdʒ] and [ᵑɡ] as onsets.
pfb said,
November 30, 2025 @ 5:27 pm
A probably worthless comment, since I don't read either Chinese or French, but is is possible that this is a quote from some classic? Literary or poetic Chinese might fit with "[not] grammatically incorrect" but "doesn't seem like a natural Chinese expression" …
DJL said,
November 30, 2025 @ 5:30 pm
AntC and Chris Button, have you actually watched the video clip posted above of Ntamack Sr pronouncing his own last name?
JPL said,
November 30, 2025 @ 6:39 pm
@DJL:
I think I would describe the articulation of the initial consonant of the name as apico-alveolar articulation with initial nasal continuant followed by unaspirated voiceless plosive release. (Not a voiced apico-alveolar plosive.)
AntC said,
November 30, 2025 @ 6:58 pm
@DJL, Ntamack senior was also born in France. Then my first question would be whether he's a native speaker of Basaa (or whatever the language is)/ does he know more than a few words/maybe no more than names?
IOW what's 'authentic' in this case?
(But yes I have now listened; it appeared after my initial comments.)
Chris Button said,
November 30, 2025 @ 7:25 pm
Hmmm…. good point, The video actually sounds to me more like [ⁿ̥t] (as the spelling would suggest) than [ⁿd] as the possible language origin would suggest.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
November 30, 2025 @ 7:39 pm
I was curious of the origins or Tattoos in the West, looked at AI and found:
"Tattoos were introduced to the West by sailors who encountered them in Polynesia, becoming popular among sailors and the working class as early souvenirs and marks of identity"
In Japan it is still associated to criminals and in Greece with "barbarians" (together with men's earrings). In China it was often associated to outlaws. Being tattooed in Ancient Greece and China (mò 墨 or qíng 黥) was made for enslaved people, criminals and prisoners of war.
DJL said,
December 1, 2025 @ 4:12 am
Interesting, thanks everyone.
Rodger C said,
December 1, 2025 @ 10:17 am
Tattoos also existed in the ancient West among the Celts etc., but the Romans deprecated them for the stated reasons: in Roman society, only slaves were tattooed, with ownership marks.
Chris Button said,
December 1, 2025 @ 8:01 pm
After verification with one of my family members, it is a common last name that is almost certainly Basaa.
Interestingly his pronunciation (as someone from the Anglophone part of Cameroon but also fluent in French and whose mother tongue is a different Bantoid language) sounded to me like [ntʰ]. Granted, I was talking with him over the phone, but I did confirm that the "t" was more like an English aspirated "t" than a French unaspirated "t".
Since [ntʰ] entails a change in voicing from a voiced [n] to a voiceless aspirated [tʰ], it should perhaps be treated as a cluster rather than a single prenasalized stop. It is also interesting that Émile Ntamack does not pronounce it in that manner in the video, which perhaps supports AntC's suggestion about Émile Ntamack giving it a French flavor. Alternatively, perhaps the Anglophone and Francophone regions of Cameroon customarily pronounce it differently since Basaa speakers span both regions.
Chris Button said,
December 1, 2025 @ 8:27 pm
Regarding "almost certainly Basaa"… I should have mentioned that the name is Basaa, but intermixing means people speaking other languages might also have that name now.
David Marjanović said,
December 2, 2025 @ 7:38 pm
I can't hear the [n] at all. Maybe it disappears completely in the preceding [l]?
The rest is indistinguishable from what /tamak/ would be in French.
JPL said,
December 2, 2025 @ 11:45 pm
How 'bout a spectrogram?
Nat Shockley said,
December 5, 2025 @ 5:28 am
Yes, it must surely be meant to be "destiny is relative". "Le destin est relatif" is all over the internets, almost as much as "destiny is relative" is.
But it amazes me to learn that Chinese uses the same word for "relative" in both of these senses!
Michael Watts said,
December 5, 2025 @ 9:30 am
What most surprises me here is that I wondered what 注 ["pour"] had to do with destiny and discovered that in this word it is the simplified form of 註 ["record"], which appears to make much more sense. This fact also appears to be unknown to Microsoft; Microsoft's pinyin input prefers to spell the word 注定 in both simplified and traditional input modes, and to get the character 註 at all I had to copy it from wiktionary. (Google's input method, unlike Microsoft's, is at least prepared to admit that a character 註 exists.)
This simplification changes the radical of the character, which I find odd, and it also increases the number of strokes required to write it (because the expected simplification of 言 is the two-stroke form on the left of 识), which as far as I know is directly counter to the stated goals of the simplification project. I'm guessing that this simplification was already in organic use and simply adopted to the exclusion of 註 by the new standard?
It doesn't; 亲戚 can only refer to people. For "relative" in the sense of the English expression "destiny is relative", I can see dictionary recommendations for 相应 or 相对, though I have no exposure to those words and can't really say whether they could be appropriately used to translate the expression.
It seems difficult to go from "destiny is relative" to 注定的亲戚 even by poor machine translation, since "destiny" is a noun and 注定 is not. If you'd asked me how to say "destiny" in Chinese, I would have said 缘分.
What does "Le destin est relatif" signify? In English, I would interpret "destiny is relative" as meaning that the same thing might count as "destiny" for one person, while not counting as "destiny" for a different person, but this idea doesn't hold any broader significance for me.
Michael Watts said,
December 5, 2025 @ 9:36 am
JPL, I wouldn't interpret "destined relatives" as referring to some people who were relatives, and who, coincidentally, were also destined. I would interpret it as claiming that the relation between those people was itself ordained by destiny; in my interpretation, two natural brothers could not be described as "destined relatives", but two genealogically unrelated men who swore a blood oath of brotherhood could be described that way.
Philip Taylor said,
December 5, 2025 @ 10:41 am
I don't understand your last comment, Michael — if "destiny" ordains that two as-yet unborn persons are to be brothers, then would not the most obvious way of causing that outcome be to ensure that both were born to the same parents ?
Chris Button said,
December 5, 2025 @ 6:29 pm
If it's there, then it would be voiceless [ⁿ̥t] in any case, so hardly that distinct in a YouTube video!
For it to be voiced and still one phoneme rather than a cluster, such as the [ntʰ] pronunciation I noted above with the shift in voicing, I think it would really need to be [ⁿd].
Michael Watts said,
December 6, 2025 @ 6:54 am
The people don't have to be unborn. I would expect the label to be applied retrospectively, but you could also imagine a prophecy delivered while they were both alive.
I'm saying that this phrase marks the relationship as special, and that, in my opinion, a familial relationship between two natural brothers is not special. All natural brothers have such a relationship.