But why is this phenomenon restricted to China? I haven't observed it with, for example, Japanese sites, even though they too use a non-Latin alphabet.
There's a few things things that contribute to this:
Market powers in Japan chose early on to advertise their websites not through URLs but through search keywords.
They will literally ask you in advertisement to enter certain phrases in a search engine to let you find their web property.
Japanese internet usage is traditionally based around cellphones, which traditionally were centered around portals. This is changing with smartphones.
Japanese numbers don't lend themselves as easily as Chinese to these double meanings. Japanese words are quite long compared to Chinese ('wo', is Chinese for 'I', the Japanese equivelant is 'watashi')
> Japanese numbers don't lend themselves as easily as Chinese to these double meanings. Japanese words are quite long compared to Chinese ('wo', is Chinese for 'I', the Japanese equivelant is 'watashi')
I think this is false. Japanese is quite rich for this. It's not worth debating whether Chinese lends itself more to this than Japanese, but as a Chinese speaker (cantonese and mandarin) who speaks Japanese, I find that Japanese is more versatile than Chinese.
Here's why:
1. all the digits have multiple pronunciations.
2. despite your point that many japanese words are monosyllabic, japanese are notorious for shortening their words and maintaining the meaning and also there are the chinese pronunciations ("on reading" vs "kun reading") so there are often monosyllabic ways to pronounce it.
3. additionally, for a given word, there are often tons of different (seemingly sensible) ways to pronounce it. This is confusing to everyone, including japanese nationals. they basically are just really good at figuring out meanings. I often have no idea what the correct pronunciation of written text is, but I know exactly what it means. This is true for japanese nationals as well. here's a great video of a game where japanese people try to guess how to pronounce kanji: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY63F5wIPzc
Ultimately, the language's ability to be able to be used in the described way depends on the ability to map the pronunciations of digits to other meaningful words. Having a smaller set of sounds leads to more overlap.
Japanese and Chinese both have the property of having single syllable digit names tons of single syllable words in the language to map to. (even though arguably in Japanese "ichi" [1] or "nana" [7] are 2 syllables, "i"" or "na" would be acceptable -- also, in Japanese "shi" and "yon" are both acceptable single syllable ways to say the number 4)
Basically either is ripe for double entendre (not sexual, though possibly that too... for example, in cantonese, you can pretty much say any number to mean penis, though usually with the wrong tone)
(edit: I just wrote a longer detailed explanation of this with examples of neumonics for square roots one comment level above this.)
> They will literally ask you in advertisement to enter certain phrases in a search engine to let you find their web property.
I have noticed this on occasion, and found it very surprising. They're basically handing control over access to their site to the search engine. That seems like a very bad idea.
Well, in the case of Facebook, the audience is actually spending their time on your Facebook page. That's different from if they're just clicking through a search engine to reach your own website.
Which is kind of the point. Unless people know which URL to type (Disney, New York Times) in other words unless you have an offline brand, you don't have an online brand - you have a relationship with a supplier of customers.
For the phenomenon of number string in email address, that's because they don't use QQ, an IM service from Tencent. For other numbers in domains, I think it's because number in Chinese are easier to pronounce, and easier to remember.
Japanese does have the phenomenon of being able to ascribe meaning to digits though, even though it's not common to do so in URLs.
In school in japan, kids often learn tricks for memorizing multiplication tables and square roots this way, similar to how US high school students have a song for the roots of a quadratic (-b /- root(b^2-4ac... to the tune of Pop Goes The Weasel).
For example:
sqrt 2 = 1.41421356 (night after night, I watch/take care of someone)
sqrt 5 == 2.236069 (a parrot sings at Mount Fuji)
sqrt 6 == 2.44949 (cook the meat well)
sqrt 7 == 2.64575 (there are no bugs in the cabbage)
sqrt 8 == 2.828 (smile)
Breaking down the first one as an example, sqrt(2) : 一夜一夜に人見頃 (hitoyohitoyonihitomigoro)
hito (一) = 1, hitotsu -- the counter term for nights, like "yi ge" in chinese
yo (夜) = 4, this is the chinese reading of "night/evening". this character is pronounced "ye`" in mandarin. in japanese, in common speech you would say "yoru" for night.
[then repeat 一夜 -- actually sounds poetic and makes it mean "nightly" or "every night"]
ni (に) = 2, the same sound also is a particle indicating place or time
hito (人) = 1, pronounced the same as 1, but the character 人 is a homophone for person. person could also be pronounce jin (chinese reading, close to "ren" in mandarin) which is how it would be pronounced if combined with other chinese characters, like "nihonjin".
mi (見) = 3, in japanese, if you recite the numbers from 1 to 10 you would say "san" for 3, but to count items, you would say "mittsu". for example, the company "mitsubishi" has the number 3 (三) as the first character of it's name and it is pronounced "mi" like in this context. mi could mean a ton of other things too, like "ear" (耳) or "body" or "flesh" (身). This digit has a lot of flexibility.
goro (頃) = 56, 5==go, 6==roku. goro is unambiguously understood to be 56. and "koro" or "goro" describes the duration during which something is occuring -- basically "time".
To me this is very similar to the neumonic that US elementary school kids use to learn the planets: "My very educated mother just served us nine pies".
And just like you can use an alternate sentence like "My Very Energetic Mother Jumps Skateboards Under Nana's Patio", Japanese syllables are rich enough that you could construct totally different phrases to walk through those digits.
Japanese is arguably richer than Chinese for this because there are multiple pronunciations for each digit. 2 can be "fu" (like in Fuji above) or "ni" (a preposition like "in" in root 7).
> -b /- root(b^2-4ac to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel
Woah. In the UK the most we got was SOHCAHTOA: "Smiles of happiness come after having tankards of ale", or "Some old hag cracked all her teeth on apples".
Or chose the heights of new buildings. Tokyo Skytree was built 634 meters high, because that number can be read "Musashi", the name for the ancient province of what is roughly present day Tokyo.
