Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says

[Lusankya]

Yes. Yes, I am; I have very limited knowledge of language structures aside from English, Latin & Romance languages, and German. The "Make some shit up" flexibility in Japanese is common to the languages I'm familiar with, especially English.

Well, for one thing, Chinese doesn't have tenses or conjugations. And yes, the "make some shit up" flexibility just isn't there in Chinese. Even phonetic borrowings from other languages are pretty rare, and are mostly limited to proper nouns (there are exceptions, of course). Almost every multi-character word is a combination of two concepts, and that goes the same for names. You can't change that without changing not only the language, but also the writing system. I believe that Taiwan Chinese has a bit more flexibility in that regard, but that's only because they had a greater Japanese influence than other Chinese-speaking regions, and even then, I don't think the flexibility in Taiwan Chinese extends to names. (If I'm wrong there, could one of the Chinese-native members correct me, please.)

I'm still trying, and failing apparently, to wrap my head around limiting a vocabulary due to coding headaches. ray245's explanation of hanyu pinyin clarified it a little for me, but heck, why don't the Chinese just issue citizen numbers like American social security numbers? That way a citizen's ID is readily referenced, and they can call themselves anything they want; whatever hassle there would be from coding obscure ideograms would only have to be done once. If they already do that, why is this such an issue?

You don't see any security issue with that or any logistical issue in creating something like that for a nation of over a billion people? The CCP has more important things to do than engage in a high-investment task like that for little tangible return. Giving people a number wouldn't solve the problem anyway, since the number would still be attached to the name, which would still cause problems.

[Stargate Nerd]

Oh yes, God knows the world need more named "John Smith".

I don't quite see how the use of the Latin alphabet translates into English names.

[DarkAscendant]

Oh yes, God knows the world need more named "John Smith".

I don't quite see how the use of the Latin alphabet translates into English names.

Considering the fact that Chinese words can have the same spelling translated into the Latin alphabet and have different definitions depending on tones, I don't think that's a good idea.

[Korvan]

This is why, if I ever was Totalitarian ruler of the Earth, I'd make every nation, country and culture adopt the Latin alphabet.

I'd do the more or less the opposite and use the Chinese alphabet for a universal written language. That's the great thing about written Chinese is that you don't have to speak Chinese to be able to read it.

The symbol for dog is read as dog by an English speaker, but is read as chien by the French and hund by Germans and so on. The Chinese alphabet was used to help unite a diverse empire with thousands of different local languages.

[TrailerParkJawa]

Well, for one thing, Chinese doesn't have tenses or conjugations. And yes, the "make some shit up" flexibility just isn't there in Chinese. Even phonetic borrowings from other languages are pretty rare, and are mostly limited to proper nouns (there are exceptions, of course).

I think Hong Kong is one of those exceptions. Its not uncommon to find people with English first names and / or they use phonetic sound a like words for things like chocolate, coffee, etc. Since HK is somewhat still seperate I have no idea how the law impacts them. The whole situation does show that while Chinese characters are quite beautiful they aren't as flexible.

[AniThyng]

Well, for one thing, Chinese doesn't have tenses or conjugations. And yes, the "make some shit up" flexibility just isn't there in Chinese. Even phonetic borrowings from other languages are pretty rare, and are mostly limited to proper nouns (there are exceptions, of course).

I think Hong Kong is one of those exceptions. Its not uncommon to find people with English first names and / or they use phonetic sound a like words for things like chocolate, coffee, etc. Since HK is somewhat still seperate I have no idea how the law impacts them. The whole situation does show that while Chinese characters are quite beautiful they aren't as flexible.

I'm not sure about how Hong Kong does it, but over here in Malaysia generally Chinese will have at minimum a 3 character chinese name in SURNAME GIVENNAME format, and if they chose make it ENGLISHNAME SURNAME GIVENNAME - when written in chinese characters only the chinese names are written, while in romanisation would use all. or just ENGLISHNAME SURNAME. For people like me who have no english name, sometimes we initialize the given name and put it in front e.g. AM Tan for someone named Tan Ah Meng. and if he had an english name it would be in full John Tan Ah Meng, in normal use John Tan.

Note there is no consistancy in romanization - people may use any dialect they choose. My name is romanized in cantonese, and that is my official name as far as the government is concerned since it stores the romanized form. You *could* call me by my name in mandarin but...

[Lusankya]

I think Hong Kong is one of those exceptions. Its not uncommon to find people with English first names and / or they use phonetic sound a like words for things like chocolate, coffee, etc. Since HK is somewhat still seperate I have no idea how the law impacts them. The whole situation does show that while Chinese characters are quite beautiful they aren't as flexible.

Yeah. Chinese uses phonetic sounds for chocolate and coffee too - those words are one of the few that do.

And I guess Hong Kong has the English influence showing with the English first names (though I'm not sure how much of that is them just choosing an English name to deal with foreigners - they do that in the mainland too, but it has no official status).

[PainRack]

For those who have no idea how difficult the Chinese language is in IT, look up the various number of computing codes/languages used for the various Chinese languages. From Big3, GB and etc, they're having difficulties just coding the differences between Traditional Mandarin and Simplified Mandarin. There are increased difficulties once you include regional dialects such as Shanghainese, Hong Kong Cantonese and etc.

Therefore, to create relatively "unique" names, you have seen people digging up the equivalent of Old english so as to create names that are different. That could only complicate the difficulties of language.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Why? ASCII supports 128 characters; UTF-16 encodes about 65,000. 16-bit computing is not exactly a new thing. I do not claim that moving from small-range to large-range encodings is nontrivial, but neither is it unheard-of to support many tens of thousands of characters. And Unicode-16 is fundamentally an alphabetical encoding.

Why must Chinese citizens truncate or simplify their names (by less than an order of magnitude) when alphabetical systems have already shown the capability to grow in capacity by three orders of magnitude without undue expense?

Because the employees who deal with the codes would have to learn every single one of the symbols?

To expand on this - most keyboards around the world have 100-ish keys, plus minus a few depending on the exact layout. European layouts already use the right alt key as Alt Gr, or a modifier key which gets you special characters, because keys which in the US layout are used for symbols (; : \ etc.) are needed to cover the expanded Latin alphabets of those countries. And this is with 30-ish character alphabets.

The Chinese system is simply a mess to do with the current main input method - the keyboard. There are various attempts at solutions, but at the end of the day, you simply aren't going to be entering 50000 characters without using some sort of coding system for them. Or a humongous Character Map application. Both of which are an extreme pain in the ass, and I don't really begrudge the Chinese for wanting to keep things manageable. They're simply screwed by their cultural traditions (naming scheme) combined with their alphabet hitting modern computing which isn't designed for it.

There is a massive problem with this entire line of reasoning. You can get palm held touch screen dictionaries now on the cheep that contain thousands of Chinese or Japanese characters. You write out the character, the computer recognizes it, and gives you the definition etc.

The chinese government could implement a terminal that contains all 55,000 characters, and uses similar technology. The processing power and HD space would be larger. No one would ever have to learn the character, and no character map or coding system ever need be used.

[ray245]

Except for the fact that the programmers would now have to dig through archives of historicial essays and etc, just to get some words.

Words that may not even be found inside any modern day Chinese dictionary.

[Edi]

Chinese has more in common with Egyptian heiroglyphics than English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, etc.

Wrong. Egyptian has more in common with the other languages you mentioned than Chinese. The reason being that even though Egyptian hieroglyphics look like pictures to us, it is an alphabet based system that is actually one of the root sources of the Roman alphabet (along with the various other sources from around the eastern Mediterranean area). For example, the letter N comes directly from ancient Egyptian. It is the word for water, nen, which they used to describe the n-sound and it was written as two parallel horizontal zigzag lines. Eventually it morphed into N over time.

[folti78]

To expand on this - most keyboards around the world have 100-ish keys, plus minus a few depending on the exact layout. European layouts already use the right alt key as Alt Gr, or a modifier key which gets you special characters, because keys which in the US layout are used for symbols (; : \ etc.) are needed to cover the expanded Latin alphabets of those countries. And this is with 30-ish character alphabets.

The Chinese system is simply a mess to do with the current main input method - the keyboard. There are various attempts at solutions, but at the end of the day, you simply aren't going to be entering 50000 characters without using some sort of coding system for them. Or a humongous Character Map application. Both of which are an extreme pain in the ass, and I don't really begrudge the Chinese for wanting to keep things manageable. They're simply screwed by their cultural traditions (naming scheme) combined with their alphabet hitting modern computing which isn't designed for it.

There is a massive problem with this entire line of reasoning. You can get palm held touch screen dictionaries now on the cheep that contain thousands of Chinese or Japanese characters. You write out the character, the computer recognizes it, and gives you the definition etc.

The chinese government could implement a terminal that contains all 55,000 characters, and uses similar technology. The processing power and HD space would be larger. No one would ever have to learn the character, and no character map or coding system ever need be used.

Umm, as ray245 and others mentioned they don't have problems with the standard ~55,000 characters, which are part of the official chinese "character set" in the various character encoding standards. The problem is the ones people dig out of ancient texts, which are unknown to anyone except archeologists.

The problem is that even if you give out the touch screen dictionaries to every gov't run office, you have solve the problem of updating their font database everytime a set of new symbols added to the character set. If they use a global standard for encoding (say utf-8) then you have the problem that until your new symbols became part of the official utf8 character set, you have to put them into the private plane. Which leads to conversion problems and confusion when your government's systems get updated from old utf8 standard to the new one.

[PainRack]

There is a massive problem with this entire line of reasoning. You can get palm held touch screen dictionaries now on the cheep that contain thousands of Chinese or Japanese characters. You write out the character, the computer recognizes it, and gives you the definition etc.

The chinese government could implement a terminal that contains all 55,000 characters, and uses similar technology. The processing power and HD space would be larger. No one would ever have to learn the character, and no character map or coding system ever need be used.

Really? Ready for the kicker? What about local variation in spelling? And we're not simply talking Traditional Mandarin vs Simplified Mandarin either.
Look up Shu Kei/Shu Qi/Hsu Chi/Hsu Qi and the 3 different ways you can spell that in Chinese. Jackie Chan has 5 different ways IIRC, depending if you're using the Cantonese variation.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

Almost every multi-character word is a combination of two concepts, and that goes the same for names. You can't change that without changing not only the language, but also the writing system. I believe that Taiwan Chinese has a bit more flexibility in that regard, but that's only because they had a greater Japanese influence than other Chinese-speaking regions, and even then, I don't think the flexibility in Taiwan Chinese extends to names. (If I'm wrong there, could one of the Chinese-native members correct me, please.)

There is some level of flexibility. Japanese names which had Han characters were adopted into Chinese names in the past generation, and some newborn are still using these type of names. There are also names which make more sense in Taiwanese or Hakka. Due to the change in culture and stuff some characters which weren't often used before are showing up more frequently in names as well.

I think that likely with the Mainland being more diverse and the education level higher these days more names will eventually come up.

ps. I'd suggest those using Chinese input at least learn 2 systems, a phonetic based and a stroke based, that way even if you don't know the pronunciation of 滅星者網 you could still at least try to type it out.

[andrewgpaul]

Umm, as ray245 and others mentioned they don't have problems with the standard ~55,000 characters, which are part of the official chinese "character set" in the various character encoding standards. The problem is the ones people dig out of ancient texts, which are unknown to anyone except archeologists.

I imagine the US or UK government would have the same problem if some John Smiths started spelling their name with a thorn (þ) instead of "th".

In fact, didn't the US do precisely this to immigrants for years, or is that an urban myth about Ellis Island? New Zealand has also forcibly amended the names of its citizens, although that was because the parents gave the children stupid names, not to suit the database.

[folti78]

Umm, as ray245 and others mentioned they don't have problems with the standard ~55,000 characters, which are part of the official chinese "character set" in the various character encoding standards. The problem is the ones people dig out of ancient texts, which are unknown to anyone except archeologists.

I imagine the US or UK government would have the same problem if some John Smiths started spelling their name with a thorn (þ) instead of "th".

Yup, same with every other languague which used different alphabet(s) in the past.

In fact, didn't the US do precisely this to immigrants for years, or is that an urban myth about Ellis Island?

I never heard about it.
[personal guess]
More likely immigration people converted foreign names to their written english representation(probably based on pronunciation) due to policy and/or practical reasons. Either for the ease of handling by other english speakers in the buerocracy or due to limits of technology (like software and input devices handling only us-ascii characters).

It was a good reason to force the use of the (country's) standard alphabet in the official records, even before computers and databases existed. Typewriters only had the local special characters(or none for english ones) and foreign letters meant nothing for people. And it's only for languages using latin based alphabets.
[/personal guess]

New Zealand has also forcibly amended the names of its citizens, although that was because the parents gave the children stupid names, not to suit the database.

Good riddance.

[Archaic`]

This goes a long way to explaining why so many Chinese students put a nickname on their papers instead of their actual name. It infuriates the markers no end when a student puts their name down as "Jimmy Liu" or whatever, when we have something completely different in our databases.

[CarsonPalmer]

I don't believe that the US so much forcibly as ignorantly changed names. Immigrants wound up with their last names being their hometowns or absurdly butchered in the translations as a matter of course, because the officials were lazy, couldn't understand the immigrants, or just couldn't spell the name. It wasn't a matter of policy or forcible Americanization, though.