I’m sorry, your name doesn’t compute
The Times Online reports that China will now require parents to choose names for their babies from a pre-appoved database of Chinese characters because rare characters don’t appear in computerized character sets.
This was most interesting:
“About 60 million of China’s 1.3 billion people have at least one rare character in their name, making it difficult for them to open a bank account or to buy an aircraft ticket.”
You can understand the programmers’ dilemma here. Which of the language’s estimated 40,000 to 80,000 characters to you include when expressing the language on a computer? It’s not practical to include characters so rare that they don’t even appear in classical Chinese writing, or those that appear in a handful of ancient poems.
It’s difficult to think of an analogy of the situation in English language without going back to the 11th century when letters like “thorn” “wynn” and “yogh” were part of the alphabet and U and J didn’t exist yet.