Oop.....The computer cannot recognize your name

[Ian_Lee]

In PRC, 60 million people have problems with their names.

They cannot get their Identity Cards, cannot open an account in Bank, cannot pick up their certified mail,.......etc because a rare seen character is used in their names.

Currently the computers in government offices and financial institutions use a database adopted in 1981 that just confine to 6,760 words database.

However, many parents now choose their kids' name from the Kang Hsi Dictionary which lists 50,000 characters.

Read:

http://news.chinatimes.com/Chinatimes/newslist/newslist-content/0,3546,110505+112005032500086,00.html

[Homeward]

What's the "rare-seen" character used in their names, exactly?

And, someone will need to do some translating of the news article, as I'm not very good at reading chinese, I would google, but its chinese to english language conversion is at the beta stage

[Jose]

What's the "rare-seen" character used in their names, exactly?

Homeward, I think Ian Lee means different rare characters in general.

If it was just one particular character in the names of 60 million people, it wouldn't be so rare, would it?

[confucius]

The article fails to give any examples of 冷僻 names, probably because it would have required the lazy journalist to use an obscure font or perhaps a handwritten entry.

It states the reason for giving kids these strange names is that parents believe the characters are somehow auspicious, beautiful, or honorable.

It seem too obvious to this western observer that if your Chinese name is so abnormal as to not exist in a basic computer database then it's really not worth all of the trouble those children will encounter in their normal life. Furthermore, if thousands of people are encountering these problems with identity registrations then why do folks persist in this irrational naming tradition?

I imagine it would be like calling your child "$@#*%" or "AQ168"

Brilliant. [/code]

[gato]

I imagine it would be like calling your child "$@#*%" or "AQ168"

Brilliant

More like American blacks naming their kids Kwame or Mfume. Just takes a little more practice for people to pronounce.

They must not be using the latest version of GB encoding, which has 30,000 characters.

http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/gb18030.html

On March 17, 2000, the Chinese government issued regulations mandating that all operating systems on non-handheld computers sold in the PRC after January 1, 2001 would have to comply with the new multibyte GB18030-2000 standard. However, the initial implementation deadline of January 1, 2001 was later postponed until September 1, 2001.

All character set standards that originate in the PRC have designations that begin with "GB". GB is an abbreviation for Guojia Biaozhun, meaning "national standard".

The GB 2312-1980 character set standard was established in 1981 to represent simplified Chinese characters. GB 2312-1980 is a coded character set that contains 7,445 characters, including 6,763 Hanzi and 682 non-Hanzi characters.

GBK defines 23,940 code points containing 21,886 characters. At the same time, GBK provides mappings to the code points of Unicode 2.1

The CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A, which defines 6,582 new characters in plane 0 of Unicode, version 3.0, the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).

GB18030-2000 was created as an update of GBK for Unicode 3.0 with an extension that covers all of Unicode. It is fully backward-compatible with GB 2312-1980 and GBK.

GB18030-2000 incorporates Unicode's CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A completely.

GB18030 mandates that new products released in China after January 1, 2001 must support the existing GBK (CCSID 1386) character set plus 6582 Unicode Extension-A, and 1,948 additional non-Han characters (Mongolian, Uygur, Tibetan, and Yi).

[wushijiao]

I imagine it would be like calling your child "$@#*%" or "AQ168"

Recently a Henaner surnamed Wang wanted to name his new son 王@. This would be pronounced in the sinofied English way as "ai-teh", which sounds like 爱他． The authorities turned him down however, saying he couldn't use punctuation marks or symbols in names.

[Quest]

Could he have named him Lovim?

[confucius]

Maybe they use Quest's "Mouse Over Me" to name their babies? I saw some rather obscure characters after mousing several times.

[Ian_Lee]

I think those parents who give rarely used characters for their kids' names have legitimate reason to do so.

Here is the reason I can think of:

China has 1.3 billion population. Excluding the 6-7% minority, the other 1.2 billion people are basically using almost the same group of Chinese characters for their kids.

However, here comes the problem. For some popular last names (family names) like Zhang/Li/Chen, probably the population with each of those last names exceed 100 million.

And most Chinese usually have two to three characters as their full names. Since the family names cannot be changed, basically the parents can choose only the second and/or third characters for their kids.

But since most parents would choose characters like strong/smart/wise/virtuous for boys and pretty/quiet/lovely for girls, the chance of overlapping names become very common.

Even in HK, when you read the phone book, there are dozens of entries for some very popular names.

So in this age of identity theft, many Chinese parents prefer to give a rarely seen character for their kids!

And in fact I was given a rarely seen character by my parents as my name. One of its advantages is that I was seldom asked question in class during grade school because most teachers weren't sure how to prononuce my name!

Because the chance that you may come across somebody with the same name is quite big, many Chinese (I mean at least in HK & Taiwan & overseas) tend to adopt a western name as their first name so that there can be more variations!

But for Japanese who usually have 4 to 5 characters in their names, it is not so common to adopt a western name for their first names!

[Quest]

Because the chance that you may come across somebody with the same name is quite big, many Chinese (I mean at least in HK & Taiwan & overseas) tend to adopt a western name as their first name so that there can be more variations!

But for Japanese who usually have 4 to 5 characters in their names, it is not so common to adopt a western name for their first names!

Are you sure you haven't seen enough Michaels, Johns, Kens, Kelvins, and Jackys already?

I think the incompatibility of Chinese names and the roman script is the main factor.

[Ian_Lee]

A western name as first name and a Chinese given name as middle name can give you more variations and less chance to confuse with somebody's bank account.

Such name arrangement is very common even among 3rd or 4th generation Chinese Americans.

[skylee]

An interesting news report -> 穗雙胞胎取名鍾共、鍾央惹爭議

[Lu]

David Tao (my computer can't write his name either) even gets his name misspelled on Channel V and in karaoke bars. You'd think that for someone that famous they'd make the effort of finding a way to write his name.

[skylee]

well I can write 喆 (zhe2) here using pinyin input in this computer.

[in_lab]

In Taiwan, I think just about everyone knows that character now. It's not misspelled on the news, they just weren't able to input the correct character, I think. I don't care if they don't make an effort to accomadate the Princes of the world, even though 喆 doesn't seem to be all that uncommon. The news reported that mainland reporters had mistakenly called him Tao JijI. I've heard that from some people on TV in Taiwan, but as a joke. According to my dictionary, the simplified form is 折.

[skylee]

喆=哲 They have no simplified forms (well as far as I know, just in case ).

[39degN]

Hey, I have no problem to type 喆 with 紫光拼音输入法。

and here is a defination from 金山词霸

喆

zhé

　ㄓㄜˊ

同“哲”，多用于人名。

郑码：BJBJ，U：5586，GBK：86B4

笔画数：12，部首：口，笔顺编号：121251121251

[39degN]

I also found another version of it.

嚞

zhé

　ㄓㄜˊ

古同“哲”。

郑码：BJBJ，U：569E，GBK：87AC

笔画数：18，部首：口，笔顺编号：121251121251121251

[in_lab]

According to my dictionary, the simplified form is 折.

My dictionary is innocent, that was written according to my bad memory.

That's smart--the dictionary lists encodings. Sorry to get off topic, but 金山词霸 should make a PDA dictionary. And they should make a traditional-character version of their software.

[39degN]

but 金山词霸 should make a PDA dictionary. And they should make a traditional-character version of their software.

Yeah, they should make a PDA, at least they should cooperate with PDA makers. But they are not good at that, on the other hand, in Chinese E-dictionary field, they are monopoly, but when it comes to PDA, there're lot of competitors.

As to the traditional chinese version, they have one already. They even used to have a Chinese-English-Japanese trilingual dictionary.