Word from China is that a couple tried to name their baby "@".
The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.
The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
While "@" is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out -- which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta," or "love him," to Mandarin speakers.
Link - via Across-the-Board
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Yes, it's a repost, but it's no big deal :) Neat enough story. And plus, with 9,300+ posts on Neatorama, it's kind of hard to keep track of 'em all! Even I repost stuff myself!
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repost :)
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I found out the hard way that the @ symbol is called different things in different countries. Snail, elephant's trunk, monkey, strudel, and more foreign names here: http://intelligenttravel.typepad.com/it/2006/11/where_its.html
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Here is a pretty cool article on the same subject.
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