Chinese couple try to name baby '@'

A Chinese couple have tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in email addresses echoes 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 email 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 email 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.

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 belonging to Chinese minority languages.

Sixty million Chinese face the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers are left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government website. The name of former premier Zhu Rongji, for example, has a rare "rong" character that used to cause newspaper editors constant problems.Re
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