A boy called Sue is one thing — but a baby named "@"?

Long story short: A Chinese couple wants to name their baby boy "@" but the government's state language commission is not happy with it.

Here's a link to Fred Attewill's August 16, 2007 Guardian story about the dustup; the article follows.

What's in @ name? Chinese watchdog queries parents' choice

A Chinese couple who wanted a distinctive name for their baby boy and came up with the symbol @ have earned a rebuke from the government's language watchdog.

The parents claimed the commonly used email symbol, pronounced in English as "at", sounded like the Mandarin for "love him" when spoken by Chinese.

But the government's state language commission has taken a dim view of the attempt to break the mould in a country where almost 90% of the country's 1.3 billion people share just 129 surnames.

The father "said the whole world uses it to write e-mails and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'", Li Yuming, the vice director of the commission, said today.

Many Chinese use the English word "at" in pronouncing the symbol @, and when said with a drawn out "t" it sounds like "ai ta", or "love him" in Mandarin.

Mr Li told reporters it was not an isolated example of parents ignoring Chinese convention and choosing unusual names for their offspring.

"There was even a Zhao-A, a King Osrina and other extremely individualistic names," Mr Li said, according to the government's website.

Despite the commission's disapproval, Mr Li did not say whether police, who are the arbiters of names because they issue identity cards, rejected @ as a suitable name.

But earlier this year the government banned names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese languages.

Sixty million Chinese have names which use ancient Chinese characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left nonplussed, Mr Li added.

Mandarin and Cantonese do not have an alphabet but instead use thousands of complex characters to depict words.

The system, which Mao Zedong had wanted to change, can make it difficult to develop words for new or foreign objects and ideas.