You do not have any saying in which animal sign you were born to. Therefore, I am grateful to my parents for not coercing upon me Rat or Mouse, lovely creations to many individuals, to which I am, unfortunately, miserably allergic. However, if Chinese is not the mode of communication for you, you may be able to loosen up such bondage, that is to say in languages other than Chinese. In Chinese, each of the twelve signs is a one-character generic term for the animal. For example, "ji", rather than "gong ji, (i.e., rooster), "mu ji" (i.e., hen) or "xiao ji" (i.e., chick), is used to refer to this category of poultry. In addition to its gender and age independence, the naming of Zodiac animals also tend to be "generic" across subcategories of some animals. For example, "yang" refers to sheep ("mian yang"), goat ("shan yang"), ram ("gong yang"), mu yang ("ewe"), and lamb ("xiao yang") while "shu" refers to mouse ("lao shu") and rat ("hao zi"). It is quite interesting to observe that during the process of translation, comparable terms in English, such as cow and bull, hen and rooster, do not seem to have "equal opportunities". Do I sound like feminist? What about the young? Have we ever seen chick, calf, puppy, and piglet got mentioned? Another observation, as indicated above, is the loss of "genericness" in the sense that all the subcategories of the animals are raising their voices (as in the case of sheep, ram, goat, etc., etc). ... If you brood over the translation long enough, you probably will be intrigued too. The good news is that if you have hesitation about being associated to some of the translated terms, you may be able to pick a more favorite one. If sheep sounds too sheepish to you, why not take ram? Boar, on the other hand, sound like a creature that has more freedom from human manipulation than pig. The truth is that as far as loyalty to the original meaning in Chinese is concerned, these terms are the same, whether pig or boar, sheep or ram. Home | Find your Zodiac sign | Lunar Calendar | Reconstrction or translation? Rat | Buffalo | Tiger | Rabbit | Dragon | Snake | Sheep | Horse | Rooster | Monkey | Dog | Pig Send comments or questions to Jane Chen    © 2001 Jane (Qin) Chen