Turtle this and snake that
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[Guest post by Frank Chance in response to my latest post. Gives me hebi-jebies.]
Reading your recent Language Log post on turtles (mostly about Kucha) on New Year’s Day made me wonder whether there should be a Language Log post on snakes. There are two very different characters used for snake in Japanese – 巳 mi, used almost exclusively for the zodiac sign and in counting (it is a homonym for three ), and 蛇 hebi., also read as ja, particularly in such compounds as 大蛇 daja, also read as Orochi. That name is known to giant monster fans from 八岐大蛇 Yamata no Orochi, the eight-forked (and hence eight-headed) great snake mentioned in Nihonshoki, the oldest Japanese history text. Tea aficionados and dance fans know it from a type of umbrella with a red dot where the spines meet, called a 蛇の目傘 janome-gasa or snake-eyed parasol. Janome was in turn a corporate name for a maker of sewing machines.
How is it that the zodiac characters are different from the characters in ordinary use for the animals represented?
巳 is also a lot like 乙, the second character in the counting sequence 甲乙丙丁 / こうおつへいてい kō otsu hei tei.
And, of course, the counting sequence is the ten stems that go with the twelve animals.
巳 mi is us used for a special zodiacal character that looks like a snake emoji, but is not available in regular fonts.
Cf. 乙己巳 on Baidu.
I have no idea what to do with the monster in the anime series BLEACH:
已己巳己巴（いこみきどもえ）
Selected readings
- "Turtle this" (1/1/25)
- "Snakes in the grass, probably" (6/19/19)
- "Chinese characters and eyesight" (11/12/14)
Jonathan Smith said,
January 4, 2025 @ 2:07 am
"How is it that the zodiac characters are different from the characters in ordinary use for the animals represented?"
The animal associations are attested only as of e.g. the Lunheng (1st cent. CE) and now also in excavated texts e.g. the Shuihudi bamboo slips (3rd cent. BCE). So 1000 years later than the 12 "Earthly Branches" themselves. In/among China/Chinese there is no sense that the Branches "are" animals signs or words or mean anything at all. I've heard only from Japanese teachers the vague idea that e.g. "酉" "is" a chicken or meant 'chicken' or sth. Which is not the case… pace Norman 1985 ("A note on the origin of the Chinese duodenary cycle").
Philip Taylor said,
January 4, 2025 @ 10:51 am
Regarding the "snake" element of this thread, perhaps see https://vimeo.com/1039746267
Chris Button said,
January 4, 2025 @ 6:42 pm
As Pulleyblank put it back in 1979 regarding the twelve earthly branches (later associated with animals) and their accompanying ten heavenly stems:
"The curious thing about these twenty-two signs is that neither the graphs nor the names attached to them have any separate meaning. Their meaning is simply the order in which they occur in the series to which they belong."
巳 *zǝɣɁ was not originally one of the twelve earthly branches. Its slot in the series was originally taken by the graphic predecessor of 子 *ʦǝɣɁ.
Confusingly, 子 *ʦǝɣɁ then came to be used for its own slot in the series (replacing a different graphic form), and 巳 then came to be used for original 子.
Incidentally, the use of 巳 in the oracle-bones is generally as 祀, with its graphic form alternating between 巳 and 祀.
There is a proposal that an attested obsolete form pemi (equivalent to modern hemi), as a variant of *peᵐbi (giving modern hebi), is the source of the mi pronunciation.
The proposal seems reasonable. Although, I wonder what happened to the first pe (modern he) syllable though?
They are quite distinct in their earlier forms.
However, where there is confusion in the evolution of the script is between the earthly branch 巳 *zǝɣɁ and the heavenly stem 己 ɣrəɣɁ.
For example, 改 and 起 have variants with each phonetic.