From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 04 2003 - 07:42:32 EST
I have a half-finished page that gives the names of the twelve calendrical
animals in the languages of various peoples within and bordering China that have
adopted the Chinese calendrical system, available at :
http://uk.geocities.com/BabelStone1357/Calendar/index.html
It covers an interesting mixture of Unicode-encoded and not-yet-encoded scripts.
As I recall, in Vietnamese the rabbit is replaced by a cat, and in Tibetan the
chicken is just a plain bird. But otherwise the animals remain quite consistent
amongst the various languages.
If anyone can give me the Vietnamese names of the animals, I would be grateful.
As to the sheep/goat controversy, the Chinese word yang2 is a generic term,
covering both sheep (modern Chinese mian2 yang2 "fluffy yang") and goat (modern
Chinese shan1 yang2 "mountain yang"). Interestingly, in Tibetan, Mongolian and
Yi, which all have different words for sheep and goat, the word used for yang2
in the cycle of twelve animals in all cases means "sheep".
The same problems of translation exists for some of the other animals :
rat/mouse, ox/cow/bull, rabbit/hare, chicken/rooster, pig/boar, etc.
Andrew
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