Bizarre names creeping @ ur language
Oh boy. (Extra points for whoever spots a malapropism first.) Slightly different version, with interestingly less symbol-using, here.
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If they name their child after the “@ simple” [sic!], they’ll give the kid a complex. [Ba-dump ching!]
This is even crazier than 4real.
Comment by Q. Pheevr — 8/16/2007 @ 12:38 pm
I use the “@ simple” all the time!
Comment by Courtney — 8/16/2007 @ 1:49 pm
While the “@” simple is…
Though it may have been a ’speecho’, if the writer used speech recognition software.
I recokn if Prince can invent some stupid symbol and use that as his name (even though it was motivated by his wanting to reneg on a contractual obligation with his record company to produce x number of albums as “Prince”) then why not allow someone using an already conventional symbol.
Comment by Jangari — 8/16/2007 @ 8:36 pm
Bravo, all three!
Comment by squires — 8/16/2007 @ 10:25 pm
I call “bullshit” on the bit about ‘@’ as a name standing out more in Chinese than other languages.
Comment by kevin — 8/17/2007 @ 3:05 am
I call bullshit on “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…” The computer part is probably right, but that last bit is borderline racist, or at least highly ethnocentric. The article is essentially saying ,”Silly illiterate Chinese! Even their so-called fluent speakers can’t read!”
Comment by Naznarreb — 8/17/2007 @ 10:24 am
@Naznarreb — perhaps we should ask some people who can read Chinese fluently before calling racist on the article. Kanji has anywhere between 50,000 and 80,000 characters, of which only a few thousand are in daily use. Moreover, the PRC imposed a simplification on their writing system, meaning that there are now “old” and “new” versions of characters; modern-day readers are taught only so-called simplified Chinese. That seems like a set of circumstances that might indeed lead to situations in which characters are used in comparatively fossilzed forms — ie, family or given names of long standing — but are not in common use today. In English, we preserve the names of professions that have long since vanished — Chapman, Cooper, Fletcher — and we use the names without knowing what they originally meant. Perhaps the situation is ideographically similar in Chinese.
Comment by mike — 8/17/2007 @ 7:26 pm
The original Chinese press statement is available at . Li Yuming’s statement introduces the department’s 2006 report on the “life situation of the Chinese language”. The report lists five “hot issues” that the department is tracking; concern about the characters used in names is one of them, and the story about the parents naming their child “@” appears simply as an extreme example of a general trend in which parents give their children increasingly distinctive and interesting names, usually through the use of rare and unfamiliar Chinese characters. The phrase upon which the author of the Yahoo piece based the claim reads simply, “Nationwide, the names of 60 million people include rare characters; the Beijing police department has published [a list of] 231 rare characters used in names.” I’ve seen articles about this “problem” for several years now. The computer issues are less and less compelling: IMEs now contain many tens of thousands of characters, and as the Chinese civil infrastructure updates, it is becoming less and less likely that the IMEs they are using will lack a given character. With all due respect to Naznarreb, the “problem” really is that people with average literacy levels don’t know how to pronounce these characters (let alone what they mean). A good dictionary includes upward of 50,000 characters, but even native Chinese speakers with very high levels of literacy only master 10,000 or so: the rest are esoteric characters that have appeared briefly in China’s vast literary history. It would be like an English-speaking parent choosing an Old English name that no one knows how to spell or pronounce; whether this is a “problem” is another issue. But the tone of the statement is not really as alarmist as the English press stories might lead one to believe; elsewhere, Li states that some Chinese are eager for the introduction of a law standardizing the structure and content of names, but others are concerned such a law might jeopardize peoples’ rights to freely choose and change their names. The much more interesting point here is that — amazingly, given the number of speakers and the rising importance of Chinese — there is a narrative circulating in which Chinese is “endangered” by “Netspeak”, English, and all the usual suspects.
Comment by Brook Hefright — 8/18/2007 @ 11:53 am