Talk:Nian

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There's a chinese article on the Nian. Perhaps this article should link to it as a foreign language version?

[edit] 兽

年兽 is "nián shòu"; why no mention of the second character? —alxndr (t) 16:10, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

The second character simply means beast. You can call it Nian or Nian, the beast. The Chinese 年 character is more commonly used in the Year context, so calling 年 alone is confusing when referring to the beast, but calling it 年兽 clarifies it as Nian, the beast, not the year. However, when spelled as Nian in English, it is not confused with year at all, hence adding the beast qualifier makes not much difference. It is like emphasizing Dolphin Fish from Dolphin due to the confusion regarding the fish vs. the mammal, but when you refer to the same fish as Mahi-mahi, you don't need to say Mahi-mahi fish. You can use both but it is kind of redundent and unnecessary. Kowloonese 23:25, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I guess I'm just concerned about this:

"Nian (Traditional: 年獸, Simplified: 年兽)"

Looks like 年獸 is pronounced "nian"; it seems like lots of other articles on Chinese terms include the proper pronunciation for whatever characters are included in the article. So I guess just adding the Pinyin for those characters would fix my issue with it. —alxndr (t) 23:30, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Luduan

I found that there is another unicorn beast called luduan. I don't know how it is different from Nian in the look. The story behind these two beasts are quite different. Kowloonese 03:16, 30 November 2006 (UTC)