Now parents must use set menu to pick baby's name (Chicoms won't allow certain names)

London Times ^ | 3/18/06 | Jane Macartney

[Revolting cat!]

What, no Dongs no mo?

[DannyTN]

This reminds me of the chinese couple named Wong that were getting divorced. They had a baby and the baby was white.

And two Wongs don't make a white.

[antiRepublicrat]

There is no technological reason for a Chinese database to have limited characters, if it is based on unicode character sets

Unicode doesn't even contain all of the old literary Chinese characters yet. If they were being fair and practical, they'd base the limit on the current state of Unicode is (that's considering that they actually use Unicode).

[Verginius Rufus]

James Michener in his novel Hawaii goes into the Chinese naming system when he's dealing with Chinese immigrants to Hawaii. I don't know if everything he says is still current practice (or if he got all the details right for 19th-century Chinese).

[CowboyJay]

Yeah. Thought-control (censorship), and re-inforcing the authority of the State as well?

[JRios1968]

How do Sum Yun Gai and Sum Yong Boi translate?

[Thunder90]

China is going to move south and east (India and Australia), Russia/neo USSR is going to move east and north (E.Europe, Africa), and the Arabs are going to consolidate in the future. They are going to share the Americas if they get their way.

[Katya]

It's the case in many european countries that the registry office looks over the name you have chosen. My cousin is married to a Turk in germany, and they actually assessed whether the names would translate well if their family ever went back to Turkey. They were then given "other" choices for the middle names. Yup, Americans are always surprised at how involved govts are in their "subjects" lives in other countries.