I sat down this evening to translate a t-shirt for a friend, but after a few moments I realized that it is kanji, not hanzi. So, I present it to the Japanese speakers on the board. The shirt has four characters on it in a box shape (2x2). I’m assuming it is read starting with the top right, then bottom right, then top left, then bottom left…but it’s a t-shirt, so who knows?
I am able to identify three of the characters.
Top right: 理
Bottom right: 亜
Bottom left: 志
The fourth character, the top left, has the character for bird (chinese niao3) on the right side of it, and the character for nine (chinese jiu3) on the left. I assume it is some kind of bird, but I can’t find it.
Does anyone know this fourth character? Even knowing it, I’m not sure I could hazard a translation. Does this make more sense to a Japanese speaker?
The bottom right character is, AFAIK, not part of the modern Chinese lexicon. I believe that character is written slightly differently in both traditional and simplified Chinese.
In any case, the text on the shirt seems meaningless to me. I guess it could be an odd name. In Japanese 亜 is usually only used phonetically for the sound ‘a’ or to stand for Asia in some compounds.