BEIJING (Reuters) - 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 "@" simple 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 Web site (http://www.gov.cn). One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare "rong" character that gave newspaper editors headaches.
That was intersting. Maybe technology isn't as advanced as I believed since it cannot do certain characters. Hopefully someone can fix it and that is a huge ban on baby naming. But hey, as long as noone there has a problem with it then neither do I.
Well, i have been noticing a trend towards more unusual names, especially from the celebrities side of view. Naming a baby @ would be a bit confusing, but if the child is happy with it, there shouldn't be that many problems.
Your name shouldn't be a screen name! Someone wanted to name their kid 4Real but the people (whoever allows names) refused it so they named him Superman.. Seriously.. Your name shouldn't be a stupid screen name.
Superman? What a name for a kid to get. I do feel that people these days are trying to give their kids names that are 'unusual' so that they are not the same as everyone else. But I think that there should be a limit somewhere along the line. Some people have always used unusual words for their children. I feel sorry for the kids, and hope that when they are older, they realize that they can change their name to something more sensible.
Yeah, like the name Unique.. yeah it's not unique anymore. lol... I don't mind if someone takes an original name, like, let's say.. Michael, and change it's spelling to like .. Meikle or.. Mikal or something.. but.. ugh some things are just weird.
ai ta...it's cute and in chinese, it's normal to have the name of the child be a literal meaning... so while @ is strange the pronunciation isn't really that bad...
well im chinese and i cant imagine a @ beside a chinese surname. It just looks real weird, cause all chinese words are anything but round.
That's just so ridiculous. The "weird" name craze is completely ridiculous in itself. http://www.infoplease.com/spot/celebrit ... names.html There's a list of just how out of control it's gotten!
Jeeez, some people now adays. I must say though, having a one character name would be pretty sweet..... Except it might not be so cool if it were "@".
:lol: I didn't even think of that hahah. But yeah I bet they'd be tech savvy by a young age with a name like that.
why are they making such of a big deal out of it, i mean he gets a middle name also right? (basically your back-up name LOL)
Ai-ta doesn't sound like that bad of a name to me. Although I'd hate my parents if they named me after a symbol. How about a baby named #? Or %?