Chinese-English Ambigrams

Chinese-English

Bilingual Ambigrams.

汉英双语书法

A site by David Moser

(Chinese name 莫大伟.)

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The following figures are examples of an art form called "ambigrams" (the term is due to Douglas Hofstadter.) For native speakers of Chinese, this figure, read from top right to bottom left, are the two characters 中国, Zhongguo, meaning "China". But to native speakers of English, reading from bottome left to top right, the letters "CHINA" will emerge. This is an example of a bilingual visual pun, readable in two scripts.

China_anim

Similarly the following character, read from left to right is "AMERICA". For Chinese speakers, the two characters 美国 Meiguo, "America", will present themselves.

America

These two figures require no rotation. Native speakers of Chinese will read the ambigram as 中国 "China", whereas English speakers will see the letters "china" lurking amid the calligraphy.

This figure is clearly "tokyo" in English, and 東京 (Tokyo) in Japanese.

Tokyo

Here we have two vertical rows of the two characters 香港 "Hong Kong", for which a 90-degree turn reveals the English reading.

Vertically this design is the character 海 hai, meaning "sea". The English reading "SEA" can be seen with a counter-clockwise 90-degree turn.

sea

The standard printed character for "sea" looks like this:

海

From upper left to lower right, the character is 東 dong, meaning "east". A clockwise turning makes the English reading "EAST" more evident.

東

East

E A S T

Here is a more straightforward Chinese-Chinese ambigram (or Japanese-Japanese; the characters are the same). From left to right, the two characters are 日本 Riben, meaning "Japan." A 90-degree counterclockwise twist yields the same two characters.

riben