[? to English] What does this sword say?
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[deleted]
AquaConvolution
I think there was a post in here around a year ago and I had to translate the same sword haha. Lemme go find my post.
今古有神奉志士， roughly means: Gods have always been on the side of those with courage and ambition. Seeing that it came from Tom Cruise's movie "The Last Samurai", I think it's suppose to be Japanese.
However, I don't think this phrase is actually used in Japan, and the letters looks more like Chinese...(It's not used by Chinese either, there are people posting questions in China asking if this is a Japanese phrase..) I think this sword is just a imitation by Westerners that's mimicking the Japanese. Especially because it's also made up by Hollywood...
Edit: Apparently Tom Cruise said the words meant "I belong to the warrior in whom the old ways have joined the new." Doesn't really make sense in my mind though, maybe more abstract...
Hope this helps!
kungming2
今古有神奉志士
Online sources make it seem to be a fairly common slogan on katana. One translation I found was "Now and in ancient times, a patriot is one observant of the divine." Hopefully Japanese-speaking redditors can shed light on this.
tidder-wave
It's from the movie "The Last Samurai".
今古有神奉志士
it is Japanese.
Searching on Google, it seen that it is from a movie "the last samurai". (you know, the one with the dwarf)
Here is an explanation on 8lang
[deleted] 5 points · Mar 2014
Pseudo-Old Japanese written by modern Japanese speaker.
I mean, it is Japanese, but it's not like... actual Japanese.
kungming2 2 points · Mar 2014 · :moderator: :zh::lzh::ja::ase: Chinese & Japanese
Thought so... It's not grammatically correct in Japanese, is it? (It is not grammatically correct in Chinese, I can confirm that)
[deleted] 2 points · Mar 2014
I have no idea because I don't speak Old Japanese. But neither does anybody else, so there's that.
Japanese went through like 5 different eras of which order to write the characters in, from "straight-up translate the sentence into Chinese and then write that down (and translate back to Japanese to read)", to, "Use Japanese word order, match the characters with the meaning, and then add additional characters to show which Japanese conjugation to use," up to the modern Japanese of, "Write down the words that are written in Chinese characters in Chinese characters, and add hiragana/katakana for showing conjugated form and for words written in kana."