Three Imaginary Girls

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As igDana considers baby names, an excerpt from a recent Courier Mail article:

A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", saying the character used in email addresses echoed their love for the child, officials said today.

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 email, 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 – which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers.