It’s “Lunar New Year” now. Of course, there are many lunar calendars with differing starts of the year but let’s just pave over that to Frankenstein together some generic nonspecific holiday because Gyna bad.
It’s “Lunar New Year” now. Of course, there are many lunar calendars with differing starts of the year but let’s just pave over that to Frankenstein together some generic nonspecific holiday because Gyna bad.
The reason it’s called Chinese New Year and not Lunar New Year is because 农历新年 translates to “Chinese calendar New Year.”
农历 literally means “agricultural calendar” but somehow it was translated into “Chinese calendar” in English. If you want to be literal with the translation it should be called the “agricultural calendar New Year”.
In fact, the name was only changed in 1970 when it was previously called 夏历 (Xia calendar), which refers to a very specific calendar from the Xia dynasty, where as many as 102 different types of calendar have been known to exist throughout the entire Chinese history. The agricultural calendar is built upon and evolved from the Xia calendar to form a type of lunisolar calendar (Yin Yang calendar) that combines the Yin calendar (阴历, i.e. lunar) and the Yang calendar (阳历, i.e. solar), so it’s not entirely correct to call it a lunar calendar, or Lunar New Year.
农历新年 (Chinese calendar New Year) is used to distinguish it from just 新年 (New Year) because the Gregorian calendar has been used in official capacity in China since the late Qing dynasty, and continued by the Republic of China in 1912 and then the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
In China, Chinese New Year is also called 春节 (Spring Festival).
Can people just say “Happy New Year” and move on? Why the need to specify? It’s not like people don’t know the date, and it’s not like “Happy Holidays” isn’t an equally ambiguous statement.
Most people just say Happy New Year but because we celebrate both new years, depending on the contexts you want to specify which one you’e referring to.
I mean… Do people not have calendars?
“Happy Holidays” also loses the contextual cue of which holiday is being celebrated, and that’s fine, so why not here?