A cow is made up of more than its meat so referring to the muscle with a different name to the entire animal isn't that hard to swallow. How the meat is prepared and even the age of the animal can give the meat a different name too. e.g. pork, bacon and ham or lamb and mutton. 

Why some animals have this distinction and not others is something I'm unsure of. This is a bit of history surrounding the beef/cow words on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Etymology

Words for meat differ from the words for the corresponding animal
I use both Chinese (pinyin) and Japanese (romaji) input and am used to having them mapped to a standard US keyboard layout. However my regional setting is Switzerland since I'm studying here and “internet services may vary according to region”. Strangely, the Japanese input uses the US keyboard layout, but Chinese uses a European layout (not sure what, but z and y are switched). (Irrelevant to problem).

My inputs are, in this order:

English (US)
German
Japanese (Kotoeri)
Chinese

As Tom pointed out, in Kotoeri's preferences the layout can be defined. The Chinese input however uses the last layout of a Latin input, in this case German.

There also doesn't seem to be an option to customise the order of these inputs. My workaround is to cycle backwards, but this obviously is a special case. If anyone has a better solution it would be appreciated.
