Qingdao Stories

31 Aug
By Emily. Posted August 31, 2007 at 12:04 pm. Filed under Qingdao Stories. Permalink. Subscribe to this post’s comments. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

Chin@

Thanks to Mom-101 for alerting me to this one.

A couple in China tried to name their child “@”. According to this CNN story, when Chinese speakers pronounce the @, they approximate “at” by saying “ai ta”, meaning “love him”. What the story doesn’t mention is that “ai ta” could also mean “love her”, making it a fitting name for boy or girl.

It makes perfect sense to me. “@” is a character, and like Chinese characters it corresponds to a syllable.

And when you live in a country with over 1.3 billion people and only a few hundred surnames, the desire to be different is only natural.

But I named my daughter “Artemis Ciel”, so my take on this story shouldn’t come as a surprise.

2 Comments

  1. 1
    Don't Eat My Buchela!
    September 3, 2007 at 11:25 am
    Permalink

    Ha. I never thought about it that way. I heard the same story and thought it was funny.

  2. 2
    Mike Boutin
    September 4, 2007 at 1:00 am
    Permalink

    Emily,

    I want to apologize first for intruding on your blog site with a comment that is not relevant to the message you posted. But, I posted a message on your Flickr site a few days ago and just want to make sure that the message got to you and Josh. Here is a link to the image I posted on…

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/78458691@N00/826011826/

    I posted on one of your older pictures and am not sure if you guys get comment alerts or not from Flickr. Please forward the link to Josh for me, if you do not mind. I would love to get in touch with him again.

    And since I have already broken ‘form’ with this post, I’m going to go ahead and drop a “Hi Mr and Mrs Murbarger!” (figuring they check this site for the latest with their family in China)

    Thanks for the time and sorry for the random comment in your blog :P.

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