Chinese villagers forced to change untypable name

[Vehl]

Source: Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) – Villagers in eastern China has been forced by the country's unbending bureaucracy to change their family name as the character is so rare it cannot be typed.

The problem affects about 200 people in a village in Shandong province who share the surname Shan.

The residents had no problem when identity cards, driving licences and other documents could be handwritten, but now they have to be printed using computers, and their name is so unusual it does not exist in standard word processing programmes.

"Nobody wants to do it, but under the circumstances we have no choice," villager Xian Xuexin told state television, using the new, easy to type family name he has been compelled to adopt.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100901/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_china_names

---

Seems like we have a tie between Betty Brown(Tx, Rep) and the Chinese government

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/09/betty-brown-texas-republi_n_185108.html



Its simply amazing how much power un-elected governments wield over their subjects.

[BrklynLiberal]

1. RE: Betty Brown: Ignorance and stupidity are admired and applauded nowadays.

:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :grr: :grr: :grr: :nuke: :nuke:

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Wilber_Stool]

4. Spell it just like it sounds.

Somebody might not like your ethnic moniker though. I sure miss them.

[boppers]

40. Uhm, that's not always possible.

You're assuming that there *is* a way to "spell it like it sounds".

Here's a poem that helps to point out the problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

[Vehl]

6. But would that not mean you are willing to give up part of your identity?

I've had similar issues...but i always ask people to call me by my name rather than use an English alternative. I don't mind it if they butcher the word while pronouncing it...its just that I'm not comfortable with changing my name to suit the needs of others. It's part of my identity and I intend to keep it that way. But the advantage of having a hard to pronounce name is that once one learns to pronounce the name...its hard to forget :P. Also, most people with non-English names appreciate the fact that one tries to pronounce their name...however poorly.


Furthermore , as a person who has always been interested in different languages and cultures, i believe any word(except maybe for some extreme cases) can be pronounced with practice...for the majority of foreign sounding words it takes only a few tries. (provided we can listen to a native speaker of that language pronouncing the word the way it should be pronounced). Especially with east Asian people, i always ask their native names, and use it in place of their "English" names. Most people appreciate it, as oft they take on an English name because they feel that unless they do so they might not "fit in".


But as a native speaker of a language that uses both retroflex consonants and agglutination heavily...its easier for me to learn to pronounce new names than it might be for a native English speaker..i guess.Ironically, it's people like Betty Brown who vindicate my decision to not change my name :)

[izquierdista]

10. You're a stick in the mud

Come on, change is good for you. Obama campaigned on it, it would be nice if there was more of it. My name changes whenever I cross a border. Whatever resembles it closest in the local dialect, that's what I'll go with. If people want to speak English with me, well then I can revert back with them. When you keep your name the same, you're only asking for trouble, as in when you go to a country where your given name is the vernacular for some private bodily part or function.

[Vehl]

12. I'm one who prefers the salad bowl over the melting pot :)

And the melting pot thing is quite old anyways....its a leftover from the 19th century when people didn't have means of communicating across the globe...and were pretty insular. Even anthropologists don't use the melting pot analogy anymore.People of South Asian Origin don't change their names...except for a few like Bobby "Piyush" Jindall. lol..but then he is probably an exception that proves the rule.


But I do try to learn the language of the country im visiting(at least a few words/sentences)...currently I'm planning to learn Japanese.....I speak four so one more shouldn't be too much of an issue...I never had any issues with English...so i couldn't care less if someone found my name to be funny...hey...our names are bound to have some funny meaning in some other world language...its just a fact of life.


Change is good...but only if the change is...er..good:) Just because change it good does not mean I have to start smoking(i'm a non smoker) I'm probably the only person in this world with my name (I meant my first as well as last names together)..yeah...we have pretty unique names....so its my sworn duty to not forsake it.:P


As fox Mulder would say...."fight the future" :hide:

[JVS]

11. Zbigniew Brzezinski is easy, it's pronounced the same as shit-head fuckface.

[jberryhill]

30. I never realized that it rhymes with "Cheney" /nt

[JVS]

32. It's a funny old world

[Retrograde]

16. there's always some name that's unpronounceable by someone

I grew up with a Polish name that is relatively easy for English speakers, but as soon as they saw the ending their brains seemed to seize up and they wouldn't even try to get it close, much less spell it right. I used to just answer to the third name on any alphabetical list. When I married I took Mr. Retrograde's good British name, which turns out to be unpronounceable by the Japanese I did business with many years later.

Zbigniew Brzezinski? Say just like it's spelled: Polish is a more phonetic language than English once you know the code. (W = English v, rz is sort of a hard sh, ni is a palatal n, like Italian gn, vowels are as is Spanish)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

3. Unicode is supposed to be a compendium of all characters in all languages.

It's how you can browse to Greek and Russian and Hebrew and Arabic and Hindu web pages and see all the text in all its Westerner-baffling glory.

Some font types in the common OS's don't implement all the characters.

Then again, that ideogram may be so rare oit isn't even in Unicode. But I doubt it.

I'd like to know more detail about this.

[Vehl]

7. it should be faily easy with Unicode, as you pointed out

provided that they are willing to sit down and design all the letters in a comprehensive manner...very few do that, sadly


btw....when i have to type something in my lang, i use Google transliteration; if my machine does not have a proper transliteration software installed....google transliteration does an awesome job.

[Threedifferentones]

14. These names can be typed in letters.

All Chinese syllables are one unique character. They do not read or write by hand with an alphabet. Words that are pronounced the same to our ears have different characters, different tonal inflections, and different meanings. The article states the name is pronounced as Shan in Pinyin (Chinese written in western letters). Very easy to type.

Chinese people type these unique characters by typing in letters through special programs. When you type in other Chinese names or words, after you press space the letters will disappear and will be replaced by the appropriate character. But, none of the programs for writing in any field have this character for the family name Shan. And rather than add it to all of them, the govt. has decided to change their names.

The real story here is that traditional Chinese writing is truly obsolete. You have to learn it in an alphabet anyway in order to write it in the modern fashion, and the traditional characters are harder to learn than alphabetic languages, since many of our words can be figured out phonetically, while the slight patterns that do exist in the design of Chinese characters cannot tell you exact meaning, let alone pronunciation.

[Nitram]

5. Japan, too

In Japan given names cannot depart from the government list of "acceptable" names.

[Vehl]

9. Oh i didnt knw that.. (btw welcome to DU!)

but is that due to the typing issue? or the Meiji restoration-related social restructuring?

[canucksawbones]

15. names

Iceland as well. Interestingly when Vladimir Askenazy emigrated to Iceland, Iceland added his name to the approved list, so he wouldn't have to change his name

GK

[Art_from_Ark]

35. There isn't a list of approved names in Japan per se

but rather a list of characters that are not acceptable in given names. There are all sorts of given names in Japan (especially for girls) that the parents just seem to have made up, but as long as they don't contain a character such as 糞 (feces) or have vulgar or reprehensible connotations, they are usually acceptable.

There was a controversy in Japan a few years ago when some idiot wanted to name his son "Maou" (魔王 ) which means "Supreme Devil", but fortunately that was not allowed. However, there is a student in my class whose name is "Mao" (pronounced almost exactly like the previous name), but apparently the characters for that name were acceptable.

[Evasporque]

8. Too many "microsoft key" people....nt

[sofa king]

17. The Chinese must be the kings of alt+shifting.

But I suppose that if there's a character for every word and you're intimately familiar with the key sequence for most or all of them, one could type at hundreds of words per minute, right?

[DetlefK]

13. Actually, that's a pretty good idea.

Imagine an ideogrammic alphabet of up to 30,000 characters.
Imagine the time and effort it takes to change administrative PC-programs in every single bureau in the whole nation (and maybe private PC's), because they can't type one of those characters. (Just import a new language library, but still.)
And now imagine the time and effort it takes to change the way a last-name is spelled.


Chinese is a very old language and fairly primitive. (The don't have tempi for verbs.) And like other old languages, e.g. latin, it is pretty rigid.
I doubt, chinese people will care about this: They have a strong mentality of unity and brotherhood (which can be traced back to medieval times). If streamlining the alphabet is good for the community, let's do it.

[Terry in Austin]

20. "Primitive" language -- not Chinese

> Chinese is a very old language and fairly primitive.

Sorry, gotta pick a linguistic nit here.

Primitive languages are actually very complex; languages tend to evolve toward greater simplicity, and Chinese, in use continuously for several millennia, has evolved to a point of simplicity where it has practically no grammar.

Almost all of the encoding is done by the speaker's word choice and word order, rather than "hardwired" grammatical categories like verb tense, noun-adjective agreement, noun case, etc. In Chinese, if you want to say something happened in the past, you just say "something happen yesterday" or "something happen already." It's very simple, yet fully expressive of meaning. That's what an advanced language looks like.

Latin, if it had continued to be spoken, would probably be shed of a lot of its grammatical baggage by now. That in fact happened with its descendants. We see a similar situation with our own language -- Anglo-Saxon English had a lot of inflected grammar like noun cases, noun-adjective agreement and so on that gradually withered as the language continued to be spoken through to the present day.

Streamlining the character set is a tempting proposition, which in fact the mainland Chinese attempted, with limited success. Even though there are tens of thousands of Chinese characters "on the books," most of them are rare, and in practice a fairly literate Chinese person only needs to know about 5,000.

The common Western assumption that a phonetic alphabet is a superior way to write, I have to add, is worth a whole other discussion.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

31. "The common Western assumption that a phonetic alphabet is a superior way to write"

I'm somewhat open to the idea that may not actually be true, if only because we are so immersed in it. But I still am of the opinion a 20-30 symbol alphabet is superior to a 5,000-symbol one.

[Terry in Austin]

36. Number of symbols

> But I still am of the opinion a 20-30 symbol alphabet is superior to a 5,000-symbol one.

True enough. However, the symbol sets code for different things.

With phonetic writing, you only have to code the 40-50 phonemes of the spoken language; with logographic writing, you're basically re-coding a whole language visually. When learning to write Chinese, even a native speaker is effectively learning a second language, where the words are marks rather than sounds.

This takes a sufficiently rich symbol set, and of course it's quite a bit more of a learning task than learning to spell in one's native language.

As to which approach is superior, YMMV. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

[Dark]

43. Phonetic is a better system for a single language because, by looking at word, you can tell how to

pronounce it.

English isn't as good an example because its phonetic structure is poorly implemented. Although, you can get a general idea of how to say it by reading.

Look to Spanish or other romance languages for a better example of phonetic alphabet.

In the sentence "Siempre se me olvida el libro," any Spanish speaker would know how to pronounce it. While there would be dialectic variations, virtually every word in Spanish is pronounced exactly as it's spelled. It makes learning to read and write much simpler.

China, however, has a unique situation: It has several languages but only one written system. So, the written language can't be just phonetic, as what would work in one situation wouldn't work in another.

The word awesome, for example, might be pronounced "Awe" in one part and in another "Some." But they'd have the same symbol. A phonetic alphabet can't account for that, but the Chinese symbolic one can.

I should note that Asian languages have successfully adapted the roman characters. Vietnamese is expressed using our alphabet with many accent marks.

[Arrowhead2k1]

18. That's what you get for using an overly complicated writing system.

English > *.

No accents, no special stress characters. Just 26 simple letters designed to be used phonetically and we're good to go. :D

[Xipe Totec]

19. ...

Whäτ à büñçh óƒ cråp. ñ/τ

[Terry in Austin]

21. Or, in English, an overly complicated spelling system

As Bernie Shaw once pointed out, you spell "fish" this way: "ghoti."

Gh as in "enough"
O as in "women"
Ti as in "nation"

It may be a tad too easy to get chauvinistic about one's own way of writing.

B-)

[Vehl]

25. I have to agree

As someone who learned English as a kid (albeit not as my mother tongue)it was apparent to me that it had quite a few loose ends, grammatically, at least compared to the ones i was used to.

English has a lot of "special cases" like the "ph" or "f".
If it was grammatically perfect, there is no need for such special clauses

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

28. Why isn't "bass" pronounced like "pass", "mass" and "crass"?

[Lightning Count]

33. It is.

I went to the lake and caught a bass :).

[snooper2]

45. ROFL

:rofl:

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

22. s/English/Languages that use a Phoenician-derived phonetic alphabet/g

Russian, Arabic, Greek and Hebrew share all the advantages English has.

And some languages have a much better correlation between spelling and pronunciation than English has. Russian and Spanish come to mind.

[Arrowhead2k1]

26. I speak quite a bit of Russian, so here's my take on that. :)

Russian has its stress characters and a couple of letters I think it could have streamlined out. For instance 'ь' is pretty useless imho. 'ш' and 'щ', the differences between these two letters is negligible to me, who needs two similar letters for two very similiar sounds? (These letters have screwed up my attempts at Russian google searches many times). Just my opinion. :)

English words and spelling derived and evolved from all over and almost every word has a somewhat rich history with regards to spelling. Russian is indeed more phonetic compared to English as its alphabet and spelling was standardized relatively recently with spelling reforms done in 1918. But even then, if you don't know where the stress lies in a word, as it's not usually indicated, you'd stand a good chance of mispronouncing stuff anyways. 'о' becomes 'а' when unstressed for instance. Is the 'е' stressed in a certain word or not? Unless you know the word, you might have no idea if you're getting it right. Even native Russian speakers talk about problems with this.

So whatever, pretty much every language has its quirks and things you have to know when it comes to spelling and the familiarity of words. But once you know English and can spell without any major problems, as most people out of High School should be able to do, you quickly realize that this is easily one of the most versatile languages considering we only have 26 relatively simple letters in our alphabet. (Russian has 33). :D

[boppers]

41. Oh, yeah, English is so easy, aside from the fact that we can't agree on phonetics.

No wat eim sayin, broe?

¿spɹoʍ ɟo pǝǝds ǝɥʇ uo buıpuǝdǝp buıuɐǝɯ sǝbuɐɥɔ ʇɐɥʇ ɥɔǝǝds puɐ 'ɹǝqɯɐʇ 'ɥɔʇıd ssǝɹdxǝ ǝuo sǝop ʍoɥ 'sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ɟo ǝpnʇıʇןnɯ ɐ ɥʇıʍ uǝʌǝ puɐ

[Dark]

44. See my post above. China's situation is unique, and although a phonetic alphabet is usually superior

I don't think it would work in china.

[musette_sf]

23. Hey, it worked at Ellis Island...

[wickerwoman]

27. Exactly.

My last name has at least three different pronunciations and more than six spellings thanks to Ellis Island and the great American experiment.

Having your last name changed has nothing to do with the system of government.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

29. But you know, this time it involves those newfangled "computer" things kids are using nowadays.

That sends people into Get Off My Lawn mode.

[Vehl]

38. actually it does have a lot to do with the government type (in today's world)

You can change your name back to the original (pre Ellis Island) pronunciation/spelling today if you wish. There is nothing to stop you from doing that.Whereas these Chinese Villagers do not have such an option.

That was what i implied when i meant government types do have a big say in these stuff.

[REP]

24. There are fewer than 20 people in the US with my husband's nearly-unpronouceable surname...

...though they did take the umlaut out.

[JVS]

34. Couldn't they use pinyin?

[Terry in Austin]

37. They do use pinyin for certain things

The Chinese use pinyin primarily as a teaching aid -- for teaching writing to Chinese children and teaching Chinese language to foreigners.

For adult Chinese writing to each other, they use writing.

[wickerwoman]

39. They use pinyin for texting on mobile phones and computers too

They type in the phonetic spelling and then choose the character from a range of options with the same spelling.

Don't see why they can't do the same with these names. If the system they have now can cover 20,000 characters, why not 200-300 more?

[Kablooie]

42. There are about 60,000 Chinese characters overall. 3,000 comprise basic literacy.

Around 7000 are in a unicode computer font which is basic college graduate literacy.

[boppers]

46. So, 53,000 to go.

Yikes.