I was reading the New York Times this morning and came across this article about how Chinese people are being told to change their names if they have unusual names not recognized by their computer system. The system currently recognizes approximately 32,500 of the 55,000 characters available in the writing system of China.
This makes me really appreciate our 26 character system.
I personally think that China is getting a bit big for its britches–shouldn’t naming children (and keeping our own names) be a given? At what point is too much government involvement? The really scary part about this is that China is the largest country by population in the world. And China owns a large part of the United States (where do you think we keep getting money from?). At some point in our future (perhaps not in my lifetime), this could be us….
Scary.
