Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says
April 21st, 2009Chinese newspeak.
Via: New York Times:
“Ma,” a Chinese character for horse, is the 13th most common family name in China, shared by nearly 17 million people. That can cause no end of confusion when Mas get together, especially if those Mas also share the same given name, as many Chinese do.
Ma Cheng’s book-loving grandfather came up with an elegant solution to this common problem. Twenty-six years ago, when his granddaughter was born, he combed through his library of Chinese dictionaries and lighted upon a character pronounced “cheng.” Cheng, which means galloping steeds, looks just like the character for horse, except that it is condensed and written three times in a row.
The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much.
That is also why the government wants her to change it.
For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.
The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.
Moreover, the situation is about to get worse or, in the government’s view, better. Since at least 2003, China has been working on a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children.
Research Credit: J
I see no problem here. With 32,252 characters, there are:
2 characters = 1,040,191,504 combinations
3 characters = 33,548,256,387,008 combinations
The CIA world factbook shows the estimated Chinese population to be 1,338,612,968, so with 3 characters in the name, that allowed every person to have 25,061 aliases, or one hell of a population boom.
Here in the Latin character set world, we only get 26 characters, so we would require a 7 character identifier (or 6 alphanumeric).
I’m only saying logistically I don’t see a problem. In a humanitarian way, it is wrong. But… When someone from China moves to the United States, they frequently use a common latin character set name. I would strongly suspect that any person wanting to type a Chinese name would have problems. I don’t speak (or type) Chinese, but in reading, BIG5 covers common words logograms, but does not even attempt to address names. But hey, when you have a language that has tens of thousands of characters, you’re bound to run into trouble. 🙂 Most of the time, I’m surprised people can read or write in Chinese. It would seem to be almost impossible to learn just the character set.