New Republic magazine has published an interesting article that sheds light on why so many domains in the Chinese segment of the Internet use digits for names and not letters. In the author’s opinion, one of the main reasons is that only 10-15 years ago the majority of Chinese didn’t speak English (and any other language that uses the Roman alphabet for that matter). So, sequence of Latin letters so simply put into words by an English-speaking user seemed like what we would call a “Chinese puzzle” for the Chinese. In that situation it was way easier to rely on a sequence of digits, even if it was quite long. That’s why digits found their place on Chinese Internet – as domain names, email addresses, etc. The Chinese play online-games on 4399.com, buy and sell cars on 92.com, book railway tickets on 12306.cn – the list of examples is endless.
There is another reason for choosing numbers over letters – the words for digits are homophones for other words. This technique is used in Russian as well, for example, the word podval (Russian for “basement”) can be written a different way – po2l (2 is pronounced “dva” in Russian), not to mention usage of the word Pi in the famous curse word – almost anyone will understand you, but in China the tendency has become a lot more widespread. In the Internet communication digit sequences exchange whole phrases. Let’s say, a phrase 我爱你一生一世 («I will love you forever») corresponds to the combination 5201314, because it is pronounced very similarly. Chinese gamers bombard each other with 0748 and 250 all the time in chats (“go die” and “idiot”, respectively). Naturally, Internet industry took this trick on board. For example, Chinese site of the largest online store Alibaba has a 1688.com URL, because this sequence of digits is pronounced “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba” – not identical, but close enough.
Moreover, numbers in the Chinese tradition are deeply symbolic. This is why nobody wants to have a four in, say, his/her phone number or email address, 4 means death. But everyone is eager to find eight – it means “get rich”. Chinese airlines 10 years ago paid 280 thousand dollars to have an 88888888 phone number.
Interestingly enough, even existence of internationalized domains is not going to change the situation soon, experts believe. Firstly, many devices require special plugins to type in traditional Chinese mandarin characters. Secondly, this language is not supported by all websites and services yet. And finally the Chinese got used to using digits in the net. And even for them typing in several hieroglyphs in many cases might be harder and longer than quickly type in a couple of familiar numbers.
