Talk:Chinese astrology/Archive 1

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

an interesting question

I was born in January 1980. It's said that 1980 was the Year of the Monkey, but the Chinese New Year didn't start until mid-February, so would that technically mean I'm actually a sheep? Both descriptions fit me really well personally, but if I was truly to be one, which would that be? I hope I don't start anything, but I've been wondering about this for some time. My email is kjclass98@ yahoo.com if you wish to answer there. Thanks. ChrisRJ 14/3/07 2:15am PST

Countries

Somebody please explain how the list of countries was determined. It seems awfully wrong for just about every sign!

I repeat in the same manner the same question. For example, on which basis it has been assumed, that Italy is a Horse country? That country has been ever assumed either as a dog or a dragon! Klava76

Chinese Hours

Oh, I guess the shichen is not called like 'rat', 'ox' etc, but rather 'zi', 'chou', 'yan', 'mao' etc...Am I right? --yacht (Talk) 05:05, Dec 19, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, not sure where that correspondence is from. That guy also put it in Earthly Branches. --Menchi (Talk)â 06:03, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The common names of the twelve shichen are "子, 丑, 寅, 卯, 辰, 巳, 午, 未, 申, 酉, 戌, 亥"; 子時 begins at 11:00pm in the modern clock. Each shichen can also correspond with a sign in the Chinese zodiac, although as far as I know this is not done very often.

References:

--Glenn W 01:06, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

You're famous!

"Happy Chinese New Year" (Coeur d'Alene Press, United States, January 22) Sholeh Patrick recommends wikipedia's Chinese zodiac if you want to know more about years of monkeys and rats, and so on.

Incomplete Table

In my opinion, the table is of little use if it does not include recent years.--Feitclub 02:50, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)

The table has two sets of "begin & end" columns, and includes years from 1900 to 2020. (It could certainly stand to be reformatted to make that clearer.) DenisMoskowitz 16:37, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)

This article should be merged with Sexagesimal cycle. - ChongDae

Table of the lunar calendar and zodiac? I could be confused but this table looks like 2006 is the year of the rooster, every one else thinks it is the year of the dog.

The year of the rooster was from Feb. 9, 2005 to January 28, 2006, so only the first four weeks of 2006 are part of the year of the rooster. The year of the Dog is January 28, 2006 - Feb. 17, 2007. Chinese New Year is not the same day as Western New Year, and the change is by the Chinese New Year Nik42 04:05, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

discrepancy

I might have found an error. On the Chinese constellation page, it say the constellation (斗 pinyin:dǒu), literal translation "dipper," is actually nearest to Sagittarius in the western sky. Sagittarius is Ra 19h, dec -25°. On this page, it says, "For example, the big dipper (Ursa Major) is known as 斗 dǒu." However, Ursa Major is Ra 10.67h, dec 55.38°. The Chinese constellation dǒu can't be both Sagittarius and Ursa Major, right? Whoever knows what they're doing and can verify one or the other can fix it, because I'm not sure.

(previous was from User:Dauvm and unsigned)

I think there are actually two dippers in the Chinese sky - I've got some documentation on this at home. I'll try to check it out tonight.DenisMoskowitz 14:34, 2005 May 9 (UTC)

Two dippers in the east asian astrology are: "北斗七星"(north-dipper-seven-star), the big dipper in Ursa Major, and "南斗六星"(south-dipper-six-star) in Sagittarius (ζ, τ, σ, ψ, λ, μ). There are two more. east-five and west-four. But the last two are seldomly used. -- ChongDae 10:01, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps this should include the story of the 12 animals and how they raced towards.... something.. to attain their status as the 12 animals... and also their order.

Those are both already included at the top of the Chinese Zodiac section. --DenisMoskowitz 12:12, 2005 July 24 (UTC)

About the element of one year

The Element column of Table of the Lunar Calendar and Zodiac are somewhat misleading. Element list there are of the Heavenly Stems of the year. One year indeed is associated with three elements, one is of its Heavenly Stems, one is of its Earthly Branches and the last one is called 纳音 na yin. The last system is invented later and is not recognized by some astrologers. But the other two systems are equally important. --Purpureleaf 04:39, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

No reference to neither inner or secret animals

This article is very incomplete and lacking without the understanding of the combinations of profiles.

5 elements - 12 animals - 12 months - 12 times a day (equals 8640 combinations)

I removed all the links as well as they were all stupid westernized crap, most of them used the wrong calender for allah's sakes and didn't even mention the elements, inner or secret animals. This page needs to conform to a higher standard instead of the crap westernized astrology which is mostly hocus pocus.

so much mess, I think I've done enough for one day. The info on the animals themselves is a mission on itself

Much better now - Now the animals

Now we should move on to standardizing all the animals and elements to not suck like this article did with crappy western influence

Thanks for doing all this! With so much to take into consideration when, could you provide some non-Westernized sources?

The Months

The relation of animals to months has been edited and changed back all too many times in this article. The single external source claims that January is the month of Ox. However some editors seem to believe that January is actually the month of Rat and so they constantly shift the entire calendar by one sign. This starts to look like an edit war. If anyone knows of other (perhaps more reliable) sources that would say someting about this "inner animal" stuff, please drop in some references here so we could check them and finally reach an agreement on the subject. Prickus 13:06, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Edit wars to whichever version were both incorrect! Lunar months don't correspond to the Julian/Gregorian solar months for starters, and the first lunar month is actually the Tiger (cited link at bottom, plus cross referenced with a rather old Chinese astrology to check validity). Have made a nice table to reflect this. Jonathan Stanley 20:50, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Blah! Both those edits happened whilst I wasn't logged in... Jonathan Stanley 20:53, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Glad to see this one finally corrected! Now, taking into account that these are actually lunar months, a practical question arises: how can one calculate what is the lunar month of his/her birthday in order to figure out one's inner animal? Prickus 16:47, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

I have seen online tables that relate the solar terms (yushui, etc.) to dates. Maybe it would be a good idea to put those into the table, but I have no understanding whatsoever of html (or any markup, for that matter) tables. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Orngjce223 (talk • contribs) 21:54, 16 December 2006 (UTC). Oh, oops. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 21:54, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

I updated the table in 'The Months' to link each 'segment' to its corresponding Wiki article, each of which contains the approximate date conversion for the segment. mpbx 09:10, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Dodecimal Zodiac in the calendar of Turkic peoples like the Uyghurs

http://www.eurasianhistory.com/data/articles/a02/1238.html (previous posted by User:Bestlyriccollection) (large Chinese article removed)

Bestlyriccollection, it's not useful to dump a very large non-English article into English talk pages. Most editors here can't read it, and as far as I can tell it's just the same content as the web page you've linked above. If there's something specific you'd like us to get out of it, please translate. DenisMoskowitz 19:54, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Typos

I suppressed a repetition of the verb "to be" in "The Twelve Animals". It originally read "each individual personality is is associated". And I also corrected a typo in "distinctively" at the end of the paragraph.

Askorahn 16:21, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

18th and 19th century calender

I would like to add columns for the 18th and 19th century - to find the signs of not only living people, but historical figures as well. Does anyone know where to find a source for the 18th and 19th century? --Stbalbach 23:41, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

If you find them, I'd suggest you link to them rather than making the already large table even larger. DenisMoskowitz 18:26, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Animal's Race Copyrighted?

I'm a newcomer here, but I think that you put a literal and extensive transcription of the content of the link Legend of the Chinese Zodiac by Audrey Lim, cited in your article, without quotes or something like. This don't means a copyright violation?

Celebrity lists

I removed the list of celebrities from Rat (zodiac) (see the talk page), and I think the lists should be removed from the other animal articles too. Presumably every celebrity or notable person who ever existed falls under one of the twelve categories, so I think decisions about who gets included are inherently arbitrary and poorly defined. And I don't see what value such lists add to an encyclopedia. Wmahan . 04:47, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Well said. DenisMoskowitz 20:43, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I haven't followed through with the change because someone objected at Talk:Rat (zodiac) and I don't want to remove the lists unless there is a consensus. Wmahan . 02:29, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

The lists are useful inasmuch as they provide some data for falsification. Say, you were born in the year of the Rat. You can check for other people born in the year of the Rat. If you find you have something in common with them, you can decide Chinese astrology is for you; in case you don't, you can spend your time otherwise.

There's nothing unfactual about these lists. If you simply don't like categorizing people, I suggest you make a case for removing every single "List of famous/well-known ..." article on the Wikipedia. The fact that every single celebrity was born in a 12-year cycle does not undermine its credibility. While we're on the issue of astrology, every single person was born in one of 12 months (according to most calendars) as well. More generally speaking, so few things really distinguish us Earth-born homo sapien sapiens that something like Chinese years don't hurt anyone. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.93.60.39 (talk • contribs) 2006-06-24 08:53:50 (UTC)

There aren't any lists of celebrities at the western astrological sign articles: see Sagittarius (astrology) for instance. DenisMoskowitz 22:44, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I thought it was clear that I wanted to remove the lists because they don't add any value to an encyclopedia article, not because I "simply don't like categorizing people". No, the lists don't hurt anyone, but I think they detract from the articles' quality for the reasons I gave. Mere factuality is not a sufficient reason to include the lists. And there are many different ways to categorize people: by name, year of birth, year of death, ethnic or national origin, occupation, religion, se x, location, and on and on. Wmahan . 05:24, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

it seemed strange-

<!- -doesn't the earth govern 3 animals like the others?- -> k zz* 19:30, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I'd just like to add that the vietnamese zodiac 12 animals are simular to the chinese zodiac animals. However, instead of the hare/rabbit it is replaced by the cat.

The story goes that the cat and the rat rode on top of the ox during the race,(cause they couldn't swim) and the rat pushed the cat into the water later, letting the rat take first place, ox second, tiger third and cat fourth. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 58.108.13.212 (talk • contribs) .

Concerning the question: I would like to say the following

1. Earth "governs" Ox, Dragon, Goat, and Dog. 2. But Ox is part of the Chinese winter, when Water is strong; Dragon is part of the Chinese Spring, when Wood is strong; Goat is part of the Chinese Summer, when Fire is strong; and Dog is part of Chinese Autumn, when Metal is strong.

Chinese Gender Calendar

Is this really Chinese? Chinese Gender Calendar. Does anyone in China actually use it? Where did it come from? All I can find are site like babynames.com. If someone who speaks Chinese could search Chinese websites it might be a help. -Ravedave 01:06, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Expanding External Link

how about adding a link in the external link section that gives information from the origin of chinese astrology to individual animals Characters & more. the link is http://www.astrouniverse.com/ChineseAstro.php Avenash

It's fine if any established, neutral editor wants add the link. But since you have a direct interest in the site, and you have been adding it to many articles in an apparent attempt to promote it, I have removed it. Promotion of your own website is not allowed; please see Wikipedia:External links. Wmahan . 17:46, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

What is this?

http://www.kunstkammer.dk/OstindiskeGB/genstande_ostindiskeGB.asp?ID=201

I presume it is somehow related to Chinese astrology, and, since it is the Kunstkammer (collection of wonders) of the Danish kings I thought you might want to use it as an external link, presuming it is relevant.

I note too that the original text which accompanied this articles was: "Chinese boxes for soothsaying" (2 Chineische pyxides til Sortilegia) Considering what most people consider to be "Chinese boxes" I thought that was rather interesting.

It's almost certainly a Lo P'an, a geomantic compass used in Feng Shui. DenisMoskowitz 20:24, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

What is the 13th (leap) month called?

The month table lists the first 12 months, but not the leap month. What is it, and its segments called? Also, which sign is this month assigned to?

I want to know that, too! I can't believe nobody here knows the answer. :-( —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.187.118.199 (talk) 17:31, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

I think that the leap month has no segments and is assigned the sign of the month before.~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 22:08, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

Took out inflammatory irrelevancy

One of the sign descriptions included something about how Japan and Germany, ruled (apparently) by the Dragon and the Rat, respectively, were responsible for great atrocities including the holocaust. I removed it as inflammatory and irrelevant to the topic. Nagakura shin8 15:03, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I think the original author was trying to explain the part about how the First Trine is capable of great good and great evil and so pointed out that Japan and Germany, nations governed by the Dragon and Rat, respectively, were causes of world war 2. I think he/she was trying to show the rough characteristics of the signs, the Rats exclusive, rigid, and brutal side and the Dragons imperious and arrogant side. WHen I first saw it, I just thought it was irrelevent and quite sensitive. It's nothing that rat persons or dragon persons can be particularily proud of and it was just not relevent. Glad you took it off. VeronicaPR 06:28, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the Chinese zodiac started out rating countries by their "signs". For one thing, how does one determine Germany to have a "Rat" sign? The date of the country's "birth"? That is subject to historical interpretation. Does anyone have a credible source for designating Chinese zodiac signs to countries? tess 20:49, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

some cleanup suggested?

This article has very awkward wording at times and is generally difficult to follow. This includes grammar and presentation of ideas.

The above discussions are preserved as an archive. Please do not modify them. Further comments or new discussion should be started on the current talk page. No further edits should be made to this page.

Categories: Talk archives