Chinese ideogram help needed

Factual Questions
1

I’m building a model of a (fantasy) Chinese airship of about 1898, and I need a little help with markings.

A friend has supplied me with a very useful little essay on Chinese ship naming conventions, and after looking it over I’ve decided to name my airship (which has nautical elements) either Haiying (Sea hawk) or Yangfeng (Ocean wind). What I’d like to do is print up a little decal with the ideograms to apply to the bow of my airship.

So what are the ideograms for Haiying and Yangfeng? I’d prefer a jpeg or similar picture file, because it’d make printing the decal easier, but I can work with whatever.

2

Ill have a go at it. Although I dont know much Chinese, probably looking up using Japanese characters would give good results :stuck_out_tongue:

Hǎiyīng: 海鷹 J(Kaiyo/Umitaka)：海鷹 Sea Hawk
Xìfēng: 汐風 J(Shiokaze): 潮風 Sea Breeze

3

This Chinese Wikipedia page: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E9%AB%98%E9%9B%BB%E5%BD%B1%E7%A5%A8%E6%88%BF%E6%94%B6%E5%85%A5%E5%88%97%E8%A1%A8
(a list of highest grossing movies) contains this line:

That is, the Chinese title of the 1924 movie “The Sea Hawk” is 海鷹, agreeing with chromaticity’s suggestion

4

Interestingly, I’m getting a lot more hits for Kaiyo, since there was apparently a WW2 carrier of the same name.
A picture of a model of the carrier.

It might a good idea to install one of these fonts to make a cleaner decal template. Japanese works for these characters. I can do it if you like, because I predict a boring day at work for me tomorrow.

Also, it would be awesome to know what kind of model you are making and the scale!

5

Thanks for the help!

I don’t quite understand which of your Sea Breezes is Chinese: 汐風 or 潮風 ?

I’m reluctant to install any fonts–I can’t on my work computer, and my home computer is a Mac–and I don’t understand a lot of the subtleties about fonts on computers; but if you wanted to install one that looked like 1898, and send me the correct ideograms, that’d be wonderful. However, the final decal will be maybe half an inch long and a quarter-inch high, so any subtle refinements might be wasted.

Here’s a link to a thread on another message board which gives a blow-by-blow account of the project in excruciating detail with lots of poorly-focused pictures :wink: . (I hope to finish it by Wonderfest, a big national fantasy model contest in May.)

6

Ah, sorry.
I guess 汐風 would be better.

Ill make some png files for the characters using an old-timey font, later today.
(After checking with a Chinese friend)

Awesome pictures! Irving looks great.
I cant even begin to imagine how much patience and effort goes into a project like that.

7

The characters for Yangfeng in Chinese are 洋風.

You can get image files for the characters by pasting them into the generator at this site. The font they use is pretty crappy though…

8

Turns out I was partly wrong.
As per my Chinese friend, the ones that make sense were:

Hǎifēng 海風 -> Ocean breeze
Hǎiyīng: 海鷹 -> Ocean Hawk

I uploaded a document file with the above in some sample fonts here.
I thought of making image files out of them, but it seemed to be unnecessarily complex.

9

Yes, this is correct. Yang means big ocean, while hai just means ocean or sea. At least in traditional Chinese.

Haifeng sounds more natural than yangfeng though.

10

Thank you very much. I can’t get to chromaticity’s site from here at work, but will look at it tonight. I appreciate all the effort you put into this; thanks again!

11

My pleasure!
Do share the pictures of your model after it is done.
Its gonna look awesome!

12

The .pdf you posted looks like just the ticket. Thanks again!

13

Are there any differences between simplified and traditional versions of those characters? Because the OP’s timeframe is before simplification started in earnest.

14

Depending on the context (not sure about ships) yang (洋) may have a connotation of “foreign” or “Western.”