A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", saying the character best represents their love for the child, according to an official trying to standardize the national language. The unusual name stands out especially in Mandarin, which has no alphabet   and instead uses tens of thousands of multistroke   characters to represent words. "The whole world uses it to write emails, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming. While the @ symbol is familiar to Chinese email users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out. With a drawnout "t", this sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers. Li says the name is an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Mandarin, as commercialization and the Internet break down conventions  . Another couple tried to give their child a name that in English sounds like "King Osrina". Li did not say if officials accepted the "@" name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals   and foreign languages. Sixty million Chinese face the problem that their names use ancient characters so uncommon that computers cannot recognize them _ , said Li, according to a report on the government website. One of them is the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name has a rare "rong" character that gives newspaper editors headaches. The passage is mainly about   _  .
how Chinese parents name their babies the importance of standardizing Chinese characters a ban on names using Arabic numerals and foreign languages the problems caused by uncommon characters used in Chinese names