Monkeys in Chinese culture
Monkeys are one of the smartest animals amongst the animal kingdom according to the Chinese culture. Monkeys, particularly macaques and monkey-like gibbons, have played significant roles in Chinese culture for over two thousand years. Some examples familiar to English speakers include the zodiacal Year of the Monkey, the Monkey King Sun Wukong in the novel Journey to the West, familiar from its TV version Monkey, and Monkey Kung Fu. Terminology The Chinese language has numerous words meaning "simian; monkey; ape", some of which have diachronically changed meanings in reference to different simians. For instance, Chinese xingxing 猩猩 was originally named "a mythical creature with a human face and pig body", and became the modern name for the "orangutan". Within the classification of Chinese characters, almost all "monkey; ape" words – with the exceptions of nao 夒 and yu 禺 that were originally monkey pictographs – are written with radical-phonetic compound characters. These characters combine a radical or classifier that roughly indicates semantic field, usually the "dog/quadruped radical" 犭 for simians, and a phonetic element that suggests pronunciation. For instance, this animal classifier is a graphic component in hou 猴 (with a hou 侯 "marquis" phonetic) "macaque; monkey" and yuan 猿