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The new Jinx character sports a shirt that I suspected says her name: Jinx. Google Translate reports "Jinx" when set to Detect Language. But when I set it to Arabic, it says "Jenx". When set to Hindi it says "Junks".

I don't know Arabic, but the middle symbol doesn't match any I could find. Using Google translate to Arabic on the text “Jinx” displays "نحس".

What language is this written and does it indeed say "Jinx"?

I've included a zoomed in version of the text and a screencap of her:

text jinx
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    The language is called "Hindi," but you might have meant Urdu since that's written in this script, whereas Hindi is not.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Jan 15 at 23:18

2 Answers 2

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I'm afraid the changeable nature of Arabic letters lead the other answer to look for a translation, where this is actually a transliteration, i.e. the Arabic spelling that would be pronounced (roughly) the same.

The text on the shirt is a transliteration of "Jinx". The characters here are:

ج ن ك س

which, from right to left, are J N K S. If you're curious, the J and the K change shape significantly when joined up here, and the N gets reduced significantly, to just a short upstroke and a dot.

If you want to play around with this, set Google translate to Arabic->English, and choose the 'marhaban' entry method, where English letters are mapped to Arabic. That's how I got the above characters, entering "j n k s", spaces included. If you leave out the spaces you get

جنكس

which is what is written on the t-shirt.

As vowels in Arabic are frequently not written, but rely on the reader's familiarity with the language to tell them which vowels to use, it's possible an Arabic reader would read this as "janks", or "junks", or maybe accurately as "jinks" - I'm still at the point where I wouldn't be able tell.

And while it is possible to add "harakat", which look like smaller decorations around the main word, to make the vowel explicit, it's not usually done (e.g. in newspapers), and would make it look less cool, which is the whole point of wearing a t-shirt with your name in Arabic on it in the first place.

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    @JamesRisner - I mean, with respect to the word "attempting", I'm pretty sure that is how you would write it in Arabic. Even though not seeing the vowel written makes it look incomplete to my English eyes, you just don't write them in Arabic. It's kind of like how even though non-English speakers might mispronounce an English word by putting the accent on the wrong syllable, we still don't put the accent mark on words when we write them.
    – JonathanZ supports MonicaC
    Jan 15 at 17:53
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    @JamesRisner Yeah, as mentioned in both answers, Arabic doesn't really have vowel letters. If anything, the way to show that the vowel should be "i" would be to put an extra dot below the first letter, but native Arabic speakers often don't bother with the vowel diacritics at all because they know what vowels are needed where.
    – Rand al'Thor
    Jan 15 at 17:56
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    To cement my reputation as a pedant, an "i" would be represented with a "kasrah", which, at least when printed, appears as a small down-sloping dash underneath the letter. When handwritten it maybe could look just like a dot, though.
    – JonathanZ supports MonicaC
    Jan 16 at 2:53
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    This is mostly right, except the nuqta (single dot), one of the subset of diacritics formally known as iʻjām, is not the only thing that indicates a nūn: the vertical line directly below it does too.
    – Prometheus
    Jan 16 at 19:52
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    @Prometheus - Edited to fix that. Honestly, I so quickly launch into "counting dots" mode, and it takes me so long to distinguish b/y/n/t/th, that I tend to forget about the upstroke that starts it all off.
    – JonathanZ supports MonicaC
    Jan 16 at 20:04
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These are Arameic letters. They look like arabic and hebrew. The meaning is indeed something like jinx (from right to left). Arameic is also a great language of the Bible, Jesus also spoke Arameic. The Arameic people are still living in Europe, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and other places.

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    Hi, welcome to Movies & TV. Can you provide a link or an image to support this?
    – DavidW
    Mar 25 at 22:04
  • There's a link if it helps
    – OldPadawan
    Mar 26 at 6:29

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