We here at SinoPaperArt occasionally field questions from customers about our products. One that seems to recur is: how come the Year of the Rooster paper cut art in series 2, shown below, depicts a brooding hen (as opposed to a strutting rooster)?
Well, the quick answer is that in Chinese the word for the zodiac sign known in English as rooster is gender-neutral, and corresponds to “chicken”. So both the rooster and the hen are depicted in Year of the Rooster-related items. How the gender-neutral chicken morphed into the gender-specific rooster, though, is unclear.
This little anecdote in fact illustrates a prominent feature of the Chinese language – its lacks of linguistic gender markers. In contrast to English, in Chinese a word is inherently gender-neutral; to make it gender-specific, one adds the root for male or female in front of it. For instance, the Chinese word for “chicken” is “鸡” (ji). To specify gender, one would say “公鸡” (gong ji) for rooster, or “母鸡” (mu ji) for hen.
The Chinese language’s lack of gender is apparently also the cause of a challenge experienced by many native Chinese speakers when communicating in English, especially when they are still gaining fluency. They often find a conscious effort is required not to get “he” and “she” mixed up.
