Wang Wei? I would think this problem would solve itself. Who wants to name their kid after a fighter pilot that got knocked out of the sky by a P-3.
Posted on 03/18/2006 6:16:22 PM PST by wagglebee
A JOKE in China goes that if you call out the name Wang Wei in the street at least one person is bound to respond.
The name Wei, or “Mighty”, is so popular that parents have been turning to ancient and esoteric dictionaries to find more unusual monikers for their children.
Not anymore. The Ministry of Public Security has drawn up new rules and babies’ names must in future be drawn from a database that excludes thousands of rare Chinese characters. Out go indecipherable names. With the introduction of electronic identity cards, the authorities will register only names that they decide to include on their database.
Bao Suixian, a deputy director at the ministry, said: “We cannot handwrite rare characters on the cards like we did before.” About 60 million of China’s 1.3 billion people have at least one rare character in their name, making it difficult for them to open a bank account or to buy an aircraft ticket.
The fashion for unusual names is understandable in a society emerging from decades of revolutionary fervour when many children were called “Leap Forward”, “Cultural Revolution”, “Safeguard the Red” or — possibly the most popular — “Found the Nation”.
Most Chinese have three names. The surname comes first, followed by a personal name usually composed of two characters. But the current vogue is for a single name; hence the flood of boys known simply as “Mighty”.
In Beijing alone, more than 3,000 men are called Li Wei — or Li Mighty — and another 3,000 share the name Li Jie — or Li Distinguished. The situation is no better for girls. More than 4,300 are called Wang Jade Orchid.
Modern parents often choose words indicating “wisdom” or “brightness” for a son and, for girls, feminine words denoting “serenity” and “beauty” are very fashionable. The naming of a child is no small matter and consulting a fortune teller has become almost essential to ensure that the new citizen goes though life with the most auspicious of names.
Zhang Naiqian, or Zhang Hold Up High, a Beijing fortune teller and name specialist, said that many details of a baby’s birth — for example, the time and the weather — must be taken into consideration when selecting a name.
Before the new police database is introduced, Mr Zhang has an enormous range to choose from. Ancient poems are a popular source of inspiration and the 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary, the authoritative work for the Chinese language, contains 50,000 words.
Is Muhammed on the list?
It sound like they are just limiting to their "alphabet". It would be like making up letters in names here I would imagine.
What a bunch of nut cases. The Great Leap Forward and Mao's Cultural Revolution resulted in the deaths of probably close to 100 million people.
Naming their kids such things just goes to show how strong Mao's personality cult really was.
doubtful
Has the NAACP (the National ASSociation for the Advancment of Chinese People) heard about this?
There is no technological reason for a Chinese database to have limited characters, if it is based on unicode character sets. Its either bad software, lazyness, or another motive.
BJ Klintoon made sure they had the most advanced software available, the Chinese have never struck me as particularly lazy, so my money is on another motive (and I have a pretty good idea of what motivates the Chicoms).
I'm not sure. Is Hunter?
So, what's the motivation?
Yup. Written Chinese is not phonetic, as are most other written languages. Meaning that each word has a distinct written character. And that means there are thousands of possible characters. Think about what that means when you're trying to input data into a computer and organize it. One Chinese response has been to use pinyin (a phonetic version of Mandarin, using Roman letters) for computer data input.
1. To maintain complete control over the Chinese people.
2. To completely dominate the Pacific rim and eventually advance their domination to include the Indian subcontinent, Africa and South America.
The joke I know is: You have to be careful when you telephone in China, because you might Wing the Wong number.
Ok, I love that joke, so sue me!
Wang Wei? I would think this problem would solve itself. Who wants to name their kid after a fighter pilot that got knocked out of the sky by a P-3.
I heard a comedian tell this joke about how people in China give their children unique names so that there is less chance of name duplication.
His explanation was something like this:
After the successful birth of the baby, the doctor in charge in the delivery room, hands the new father at least six or more metal surgical instruments.
The father then holds them all in one hand out in front of him at head heighth, then releases them all at once to let them fall on the tile floor of the delivery room.
What ever sound is created by this action, is the name of the child, (i.e.....pin-pang-ting, boing-bing-ding, bang-bong-ping, etc,etc,etc........)
It's mostly because of Chinese character limitations. Traditionally, Chinese people can "make up" characters for the names of their children. This creates tons of problems for computer technology, as Unicode cannot update fast enough for these made up characters and there is no financial incentive to cater to the whims of one particular family. There is also the issue of fonts, fonts are man-made and individually crafted, and good high-quality fonts require lots of resources. Chinese characters are like Latin letters. A 50,000 character fontset will be much more expensive than a 5,000 character fontset. There comes a time when you have to have a limit. No one is willing to buy a 500,000 (and ever-increasing) character fontset with 490,000 extremely rare characters.
The average Chinese person can only read 3000 characters anyway. Think about how how it is for the average American to just type in an accent mark. Now multiply the problem a thousand fold.
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