i bought a chinese seal with two characters on it. Ive translated the second word as "hope",?

Question

im stuck on the first word. i presume it is a saying so if anyone has any idea what the saying maybe i can check the first character and see if it matches. thanks for your help

my photo is an impression of the characters so they are the right way round. A book on chinese i have says the second character is either " hope" " few " or "rare". A website says it is hope. but am i reading it the right way. do the chinese read from right to left so that hope is the first word?

i have a photo now at http://uk.360.yahoo.com/tgreen4me

thanks for all replies. another website had a matching for the word " draw " so I suppose it could mean Take Hope but I'm probably wrong. I bought it for a pound in a car boot sale. I do japanese and chinese artwork and was going to use the seal but if it is a name and grind it down and carve something else. thanks again for all your help

Answer 1

If you look at them individually, the 1st character 拉 (La) means "(to) pull", the 2nd one 希 (Xi) as in 希望 means "hope". It is not a saying at all. When you put them together, they are just transcription of a foreign word, possibly "Lassie".

"Rare" or "few" would be 稀.

It is a common mistake to separately translate Chinese characters. You can't have meaning when you do transcription. This is like asking an English speaker what the English meaning of Chinese names, "Chan" or "Wu" in English.

May I add, Ms. Condoleezza Rice is completely wrong about the "opportunity" in the word "crisis"! Don't translate individually!

Nice art work, by the way. It's a nice seal.

Answer 2

the Second word 希 cannot mean "hope" by itself unless it's paired with "希望",

The First word 拉 means "pull", so two words put together, it means nothing.

But you HAVE to know, it's a seal, and chinese seal are general used to carve NAMES more than anything else, I suspect (with 99.95% confident) that it's a name seal, and a chinese translated name for some foreign name, because the translated name looks really common in one way or the other. Now don't ask me where my 0.05% confidence went to, 99.95% is now my commonly used cliche. Can't help it if you're also studying financial econometrics at the moment *groan*

I'm not sure what do you exactly mean by "the right way round", for name seals, the "right way round" should be as you stamp it then you read from right to left.

But doesn't matter, according to how you put it in picture, the pronunciation is "La-Xi", which is a common chinese name-translation for an Arabic/Malay guy's name "Rasheed/Rashid"

If it's the other way around "Xi-La", it's also a very common chinese name-translation for an Indian lady's name "Sheela"

Mind sharing where you bought this seal? I might get more info just from where where you bought this seal (My guessing is that didn't get this seal from China, but some other country)

Answer 3

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Answer 4

i htink you may have translated the second word wrong. theres no one word for hope (atleast i dont think soi think its 2 words put together). take a picture and post it up here. i'll check back here later incase u put it up and then edit my answer.

Answer 5

scan or take a photo and upload to the web and post the link here maybe that will help identify your mystery symbol.

Answer 6

The first word is probably 'Bob'

Answer 7

NO is the word your looking for.

Answer 8

There's too many things it could be.

Answer 9

abandon

Answer 10

NO hope