>And there are only a hundred or so different names (in pinyin without tone marks)...
My instinct tell me that's not correct. So I did the calculation:) From the ancient Chinese surname document "百家姓" [1], there're more than 500 hundreds surnames listed. And by removing the tone marks, I got 295 unique surnames in pinyin. But these are just surnames commonly used thousand years ago. Multiple by thousands unique first names, I believe that there're at least hundreds of thousands different names in pinyin.
Of course this is still far less than the number of different names in western countries. But it's not the main reason that some people in China use number style email addresses.
My instinct tell me that's not correct. So I did the calculation:) From the ancient Chinese surname document "百家姓" [1], there're more than 500 hundreds surnames listed. And by removing the tone marks, I got 295 unique surnames in pinyin. But these are just surnames commonly used thousand years ago. Multiple by thousands unique first names, I believe that there're at least hundreds of thousands different names in pinyin.
Of course this is still far less than the number of different names in western countries. But it's not the main reason that some people in China use number style email addresses.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_surname