Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Paul, there is absolutely no reason for you to be this upset/argumentative and calling people self-righteous over a news article about a Chinese couple naming their child "@". It's okay to debate the point but there's no reason to cop an attitude over it. Feel free to make your point, but you don't have to belittle everyone else on the thread in order to do so.



The problems I forsee with this name do stem from computers. Have you ever tried to sign up for something and it tells you that a certain symbol you used isn't allowed? Like a dash or an asterisk? That could cause problems when signing @ up for school or other things. And how will @ fill out his SAT form? You need to fill in bubbles that correspond with the letters in your name. @ is not a letter. The parents should be perfectly within their rights to give their child any ridiculous name they can think of, but obviously in China they don't legally have that right:



Their government is ticked and is making an example out of them for this.

Yeah, I mean, regardless of anything else, this should be none of the government's business. So what if there are parents who don't want to name their kids Sarah and Jenny and Michael? I mean, there can be problems with names, other than if the kid doesn't like it, like if a parent named their kid "Poopyface" or something like that, but the government's annoyance should not be one of the problems. They can be annoyed or amused or whatever, but parents have the right to name their kids anything they want (maybe with a few distant boundaries.)

As for me, I'm not planning on having kids, but if I did, I'd marry a guy with the last name Walker and call my kid Sky.

They can name their child what they want, but they should realize it will cause problems later in life

Point.

One of the rare moments in which it only takes one word to adequately make a post on PPT.

So you'd be fine with someone in the USA being named "--!--" or "%#" or "DANGER!" because it's none of the government's business?

I'd personally think it was ridiculous, but there are plenty of things people do within their constitutional rights that I think are ridiculous. Doesn't mean I get to tell them they can't do it.

The tutor/employer/etc. is more likely to assume it's a mistake. I should think it'd happen regularly even resulting in said child being left out due to "mistakes". Unless they want to go round writing "MY NAME IS "@" PRONOUNCED "Ai Ta", which seems to defeat the point but would certainly get recognition. =D



Regardless of what regular people think of a name, it shouldn't be any of the government's business. Although if the name clearly offensive maybe there would be reason to step in for the child's safety if nothing else. I'm not sure that would be the government's place either though, at least not here anyway.

haha anyone seen russel peters? this is like the african that was named !xobile hahaha

We don't call it "Ai Ta". :|
As far as I know, even the Chinese pronounce it as "at".

Which isn't very far. If you had read the full article, you would have learnt that the letters a and t can be pronounced to mean 'love him', which is 'ai-ta'.

I can't imagine how "Ay Tee" sounds like "Ai Ta". Not to mention we pronounce it as "at", a single syllable sound.

And I don't need to read the article to 'learn' that. I'm a native Chinese speaker myself, and trust me, I can tell the difference between '@' and 'love him'. I don't care what this vice director of the State Language Commission says, we pronounce it as 'at'. Not 'ay tee', not 'love him' and certainly not 'ai ta'.

Well, I don't care what you say.

I'm with you on that. I'm Singaporean Chinese, but Chinese all the same, and a and t does not make 'ai-ta'. The whole word 'at' might, maybe, at a stretch. Rather like Japanese and their end 't' sounds, eg 'knight' into 'naito'.

I think the parents happened upon this happy coincidence (that you can sort of pronounce @ as 'ai ta' and decided to name him that. The explanation of why 'ai ta' is unclear, that's what. It's not actually a translation, as they say it is, not even a reverse-romanization kind of thing.