Chinanews, Beijing, Aug 19 – The Ministry of Education and the Language Affairs Commission on Thursday jointly issued a report on the conditions concerning linguistic life in China in the year of 2006. The report shows that some changes are taking place in Chinese people's names. Sometimes, some Chinese people adopt very strange names.An investigation done last year showed that in China, there were about 23,000 different surnames existing in China. Of them, 87% of the Chinese population had used surnames that belonged to the most common 129 surnames. At present, some changes are taking place in the way that Chinese people adopt names. Names with four characters now have appeared (normally, Chinese people's names consist of two or three characters). In addition, strange names, such as Zhao Yi A (Chinese characters mixed with an English letter) or Ao Si Rui Na Wang (sounds like a foreign name but written in Chinese), have emerged. A father calls his child “@.” According to him, the symbol is widely used in all email addresses. The symbol, read as “at” in English, sounds very much like “love him” in Chinese. In China today, there are about 60 million Chinese whose names contain some strange characters. The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau once published strange names used by 231 people, said Li Yuming, deputy director of the Language Affairs Commission.In many cases, the names of ethnic minorities do not have a fixed way of translation. Many names of ethnic minority people, when translated into Han Chinese characters, are translated at discretion. This could cause much confusion. In order to solve this problem, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government has publicized a book that sets down standards to be observed when Uygur people's names are translated into Han characters. Some people in society have called upon the central government to publish some regulations to standardize the use of surnames. However, some other people object to the proposal, claiming that any citizen has the right to choose whatever names he or she likes, Li noted.