When efficiency isn’t everything
According to an article in the Internationl Herald Tribune, as many as sixty million Chinese citizens are facing a unique problem. China is rolling out a new identity database to keep better track of their citizens. Unfortunatly, the new identity database only recognizes 32,252 unique characters, far less than the estimated 55,000 characters in the Chinese language. Meaning huge numbers of Chinese citizens who happen to have those characters in their names, will soon have to change them.
It’s not clear why this apparent trade-off (fewer characters means fewer hard-drives to store the names database?) was made. But saving storage space at the expense of the developing cultural and lingual richness of the Chinese language, and the traditional freedom to uniquely name your children, seems like a poor trade-off in any language.
