Reminder to everyone that we are officially transitioning from the Year of the Rat to the Year of the Ox, so update your diets accordingly
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Like, ranchers only keep intact bulls around at all for stud purposes and no one wants to be thinking about that Then again, that's also generally the only reason people keep roosters around, but they had fewer good choices for how to translate "chicken"
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Anyway the zodiac sign really is just "cow", not "ox", "pig", not "boar", "chicken", not "rooster" What I find most interesting is 羊, "caprid", which we don't have a common word for in English
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There are two famous kinds of domesticated caprid - sheep and goats And the problem is in our culture sheep and goats have almost exactly opposite cultural connotations Hell the Bible has a parable to that effect
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So whether the translator picks "Sheep" or "Goat" as the name of the zodiac sign is this whole fraught thing, a typical Westerner will have very different reactions to either one I think you can safely call this the result of Christian religious influence
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Although, yes, there's plenty of other species the word 羊 applies to, like antelope, Ibex, musk ox, etc
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Or maybe ox is "exotic"
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Nah, it's just the most neutral word we have short of "bovid". English is weird like that -- a lot of our animal names are inconveniently gendered.
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or just utility oxen pull plows, oxen pull wagons, oxen are docile and useful bulls are for stud and for chasing young men down streets in rural spain and for fighting with swords and for riding for at least 4 seconds
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