Baby News From China

08.10.08 / Baby Names / Author: glennys / Comments: (1)
Tags: china, chinese baby names

China has 1.3 billion people who share approximately 100 surnames. A disadvantage of these numbers is that police work is hindered. The Public Security Commission is thinking of making new rules so that children will take the surnames of both their mother and father, in a hyphenated form. They figure this will create 1.28 million new surnames.

While the hyphen has been allowed, other punctuation marks are not allowed. One Chinese man wanted to give his child the name “@”, but because it cannot be translated into Mandarin, he was not given permission to use that symbol. He thinks because it is on the computer keyboard, “@” should be fair game. How would you pronounce that anyway? At?