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

I've always been kind of interested by the "standard translations" used for the animals

In Chinese the zodiac signs are a single character, and the English translations are often more specific than that word

鼠 by itself most commonly gets interpreted as "rat", sure but the word by itself applies to all rodents

Mice and rats are more specifically 老鼠 ("old rodents", idiomatically "common rodents"), with mice 小鼠 ("small rodents") and rats 大鼠 ("large rodents")

There's also 松鼠 ("pine tree rodents", squirrels)

袋鼠 ("bag rodent", kangaroos)

鼬鼠 ("yellow rodent", mustelids)

黄鼠狼 ("mustelid wolf", weasels)

負鼠 ("burdensome rodent", opossums)

雷鼠 ("thunder rodent", Raichu)

Anyway yeah the current year is the year of the 牛 (niu), which sounds better as "ox" I guess but it's just "cow"

Or "bovine" (annoyingly, if you're a farmer all of the common words for bovines are specific, like "cow" is female)

I mean the word 牛 by itself in Chinese can also just mean "beef"

Which is the case in most languages that didn't develop the distinction between the names for animals and their meat that English did

It's the Year of Beef

A Beefyear

Anyway this is a whole thing because technically the distinction between an "ox" and other kinds of cattle is a matter of function and not biology - an ox is usually a castrated male (a steer) but all it means is that it's been trained to pull a plow and is for work, not food

An ox can technically be a cow or a bull too, in a pinch

And in more ancient farming cultures that hadn't bred animals as extensively as in later years, the distinction between working animals and meat animals wasn't nearly so sharp

Especially with ancient China not being much of a dairy culture (lactose intolerance being much more common) compared to Europe or India

And the original 牛 they kept were probably water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) not Bos taurus

It's a whole complicated thing

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

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"

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

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

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