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China @ odds over baby's name
16/08/2007 12:43 - (SA)
Beijing - A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.
The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which
has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of
multi-stroke characters to represent words.
"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated
into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained,
according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission
Li Yuming.
While the "@" symbol is familiar to Chinese e-mail users,
they often use the English word "at" to sound it out - which
with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love
him", to Mandarin speakers.
Li told a news conference on the state of the language that
the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly
adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the
internet break down conventions.
Another couple tried to give their child a name that
rendered into English sounds like "King Osrina".
Li did not say if officials accepted the "@" name. But
earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using
Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not
belong to Chinese minority languages.
Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names
use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot
recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching
their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing
on the government website (www.gov.cn).
One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name
had a rare "rong" character that gave newspaper editors
headaches.
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