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It is possible someone can add the English translations [meanings] for the 24 Directions? I only see four English words North, South, East, West given - 20 more remain without clarity. Thank You In Advance. 4.238.237.18 01:27, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Looking at the version today, it looks like 8 directions are translated (north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest). To the best of my knowledge, English doesn't have specific names for each of the 24 listed directions.
I thought it was interesting to read the paragraph following the table, about a 48-point compass, and adding an additional midpoint (for 96 directions total) by combining the names of the nearest two directions. English does this with the 4 cardinal directions... any compass direction between about 22.5 and 67.5 degrees is referred to as "northeast", but the actual lines between north/northeast/east are sometimes vaguely defined. If we need more than 8 directions, we use terms like "north-northeast" to refer to the area between north and northeast... so you would end up with the following table of names and directions:
Written | Spoken | Left end of range |
Center of range |
Right end of range |
---|---|---|---|---|
N | north | 348.75° | 0° | 11.25° |
NNE | north-northeast | 11.25° | 22.5° | 33.75° |
NE | northeast | 33.75° | 45° | 56.25° |
ENE | east-northeast | 56.25° | 67.5° | 78.75° |
E | east | 78.75° | 90° | 101.25° |
ESE | east-southeast | 101.25° | 112.5° | 123.75° |
SE | southeast | 123.75° | 135° | 146.25° |
SSE | south-southeast | 146.25° | 157.5° | 168.75° |
S | south | 168.75° | 180° | 191.25° |
SSW | south-southwest | 191.25° | 202.5° | 213.75° |
SW | southwest | 213.75° | 225° | 236.25° |
WSW | west-southwest | 236.25° | 247.5° | 258.75° |
W | west | 258.75° | 270° | 281.25° |
WNW | west-northwest | 281.25° | 292.5° | 303.75° |
NW | northwest | 303.75° | 315° | 326.25° |
NNW | north-northwest | 326.25° | 337.5° | 348.75° |
But this table has 16 entries, while the Chinese table has 24. So the systems are not orthogonal... the direction names are a little less specific in the English system, and thus there isn't a single name to correspond to each direction in the Chinese system. I think this is why there aren't translations for each Chinese direction...
Infinoid 15:44, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Also please note there is a 32-point English system described on the Boxing the compass page. Written by smarter people than me :)
You could find enough names in that system to fill in the blanks on the Earthly Branches page, but the actual angles (in degrees) don't match up exactly. I wouldn't really call them "translations" - they'd be more like "closest equivalents", I think. Also, until today (after reading the Boxing the compass page), I had never heard of things like "SEbE". So I'm hardly an expert in such matters.
Infinoid 18:12, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
Ancient chinese put Zi (South) on the top. I changed the image.--刻意(Kèyì) 18:08, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
Since the image is of a fountain representing the Kazakh version of the 12 signs, should we not have discussion of the Kazakh version here? Or at least a link to it? LordAmeth (talk) 23:10, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
Pardon my ignorance, but why is there Turkish in the table? I understand that Japanese and other East Asian languages are included, as they were in the same culture sphere. But that can't be assumed for Turkish. Nowhere else does the article refer to any special association of the Earthly Branches with Turkish culture. Since this has been added by an anonymous user who has not edited since and is therefore not available for comment, I think we should simply revert the change. — Sebastian 22:26, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for your support. I'm not surprised that the animal cycle also played an important role in Khazakhstan - which was much closer to China than to regions using other calendars. (Almaty is only 200 km from the modern Chinese border.) But, at least in Islamic times, I would be amazed if Turkey and Iran had used anything but the Hijri calendar. — Sebastian 05:16, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Interesting! That's what I love about working on Wikipedia: You always learn something new. I think this information would be a great addition to the article. Would you have sources for it? — Sebastian 16:30, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
Is there a reason why this page is linked to Jupiter?
Joeygbh (talk) 04:22, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
Are the latin-alphabet names for dragon and horse correct?
Although I don't understand Chinese myself, a native speaker tells me the Chinese word for dragon is "long" and horse should be something like "ma". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.169.72.155 (talk) 11:04, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
on my traslater dragon is Long, not Chen.
--Iching4096 (talk) 12:51, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
In the section "Origin" the first sentence tells us that "This system was built from observations of the orbit of Jupiter.". From a historical point of view, this cannot be "the true origin", as the Sexagenary cycle was first used for the recording of days (as a kind of "week" of 60 days, running without any kind of interruption through both lunar months and seasonal years) in the late Shang era about 1250 B.C.E. Only about 1000 years later (in the Qin and early Han eras, as earliest about 250 B.C.E.) do we find any evidence for use of the Sexagenary cycle for recording of years. As Jupiter's sidereal orbital cycle is (a bit less than) 12 years, it seems, at least to me, to be probable that the Chinese at this later time correlated "the twelve Earthly Branches" with Jupiter's "residing" in different parts of the Chinese "zodiac" (possibly from contact with astronomers from India, whose "Indian 60-year cycle", however, really follows Jupiter's "true" orbital period and therefore often only has 59 years), but this cannot be the original source for the cycle of "the twelve Earthly Branches", which existed more than 1000 years earlier. Does anyone have any information about the "true", historical source of this Chinese cycle of "the twelve Earthly Branches"? And if so, could that information (of course from a scientific, cited source) be incorporated into this Wikipedia page? /Erik Ljungstrand (Sweden) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.241.158.201 (talk) 11:50, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
This whole section baffles me.
The terrestrial branches are still commonly used nowadays in Chinese counting systems similar to the way the alphabet is used in English. For example, names in legal documents and contracts where English speakers would use K, L, M, etc. ...
Where would English speakers use K, L, M? (Why not A, B, C?) Is this about enumerating the clauses, or fictional names used for the parties, or what?
Since the celestial stems and terrestrial branches combined only consist of 22 characters, the four final letters – W, X, Y, and Z – cannot be represented by any of the celestial stems and terrestrial branches, and those four letters are represented by '物', '天', '地', and '人', respectively, instead.
Why would a Chinese contract need specifically to represent the 26 Latin letters?
In case of upper-case letters, the radical of '口' (the 'mouth' radical) may be added to the corresponding terrestrial branch or any of '物', '天', '地', and '人' to denote an upper-case letter.
Again, why do Latin letters need to be represented at all, let alone distinguished by case? —Tamfang (talk) 21:48, 15 April 2024 (UTC)