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
