Anyway the English translations seem to be trying to pick the more masculine word for the animal whenever possible, although I guess they picked "Ox" instead of "Bull" because "Bull" was TOO masculine
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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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Replying to @arthur_affect
There's a year I've seen translated as both rabbit and cat. Are they related words in Chinese?
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Replying to @mollydot
I wasn't aware of this until I looked it up right now but it's not a case of a related word It's because the Vietnamese zodiac straight up replaces the Rabbit sign from the Chinese zodiac with the Cat sign
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mollydot
I don't know why that is It's kind of fascinating because there probably is history here - there's a well known Chinese folktale for kids about how the Cat was supposed to be on the Zodiac but he missed his shot because he slept in
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mollydot
I thought it was because the rat screwed him over and gave him the wrong day or time or whatever?
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The Rat promised to wake him up on the day of the big meeting and then didn't
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