Accidental Blogger

What do you do if you want your child to stand out among a billion plus of his fellow countrymen in a nation where only 129 different surnames account for 87% of all family names in use?  Surely, you give him a modern name that is at once easily recognizable and different from everyone else’s. How about the symbol @ which stands for "at" in email accounts?  Short, sweet and universally recognized.

So figured a Chinese couple who have caused a stir by choosing @ as the name of their newborn son. Although it may seem a bit preposterous in English, the @ symbol makes more traditional sense when spoken in Mandarin. Pronounced in English as ‘at,‘ the symbol @ sounds like the Chinese phrase "ai ta", or "love him". Officials in China are not happy with such modern innovations because it is difficult to incorporate new words of foreign origin into the pictorial Chinese language which lacks the phonetic alphabet.

I think the Chinese authorities should let @ into the vocabulary. After all, as "ai ta," it has a more loving connotation than this one, when a Chinese baby got his moniker from the combination of the two most fearsome names in 2003!

A Chinese couple seeking a distinctive and modern name for their child chose the commonly used @ symbol., much to the consternation of Chinese officials.

The unidentified couple and the attempted naming were cited Thursday by a Chinese government official as an example of bizarre names creeping into the Chinese language.

"The father said ‘the whole world uses it to write emails and translated into Chinese it means’love him’," Li Yuming, the vice director of the State Language Commission, said at a news conference.

The symbol pronounced in English as ‘at’ sounds like the Chinese phrase "ai ta", or "love him".

Written Chinese does not use an alphabet but is comprised of characters, sometimes making it difficult to develop new words for new or foreign things and ideas.

In their quest for a different name, Li said that the parents of baby "@" were not alone.

As of last year, only 129 surnames accounted for 87 per cent of all surnames in China, Li said, suggesting that the uniformity drove people to find more individual given names.

Li did not say whether police, who are the arbiters of names because they issue identity cards, rejected baby "@" and the others.

But nationwide last year there were 60 million people’s names that used "unfamiliar characters," Li said.