Some Asian names for the unicorn
The
Chinese name for the unicorn is
qílín (or
k'i-lin in
Wade-Giles romanization), from which comes the Japanese
kirin,
Mongol kilin,
Manchu tsiling. The Chinese is a compound of
qí, the male unicorn, and
lín, the female unicorn.
It is not the same as the Western heraldic unicorn accurately described by Andara above, but it is similarly chimerical: in the Han i araha Manju gisun i buleku bithe (a Manchu dictionary compiled in China in 1708) it is described as being the first among quadrupeds. It has the body of a roe-deer, the tail and hooves of an ox, the head of a sheep, the legs of a horse, and a horn ending in flesh. It is twelve feet high, and its body is of five colours. It is of a benevolent nature; when it goes it neither crushes worms nor breaks the vegetation.
There are a number of other words for 'unicorn' in Central Asian languages. Commonly there is also a semantic shift with the ideas of 'rhinoceros', 'horn', and 'eland'. In part this is because we no longer know what old texts mean precisely, but also in part it is of course because the chroniclers themselves were not clear about what they were describing.
There is a Mongol kers or keris, used for both unicorn and rhinoceros, and possibly derived from Arabic h!ariish, a beast of uncertain type.
There is a Sino-Uyghur word qat; and various forms like qaat and qght appear in a Middle Turkish text about an Oghuz khan, in which a unicorn features prominently: these and the existence of an Old Turkish ktki suggest a derivation from Sanskrit khad.ga 'rhinoceros'; though there is also an Arabic qat!&aa, some kind of two-horned beast. (Note that older Turkish texts were written in Arabic script so not all vowels were supplied.)
Another form in Mongol is serü, which is Manchu seru. These might just mean 'rhinoceros', and come from Tibetan bse-ru, influenced by the Persian saru 'horn' (which itself was borrowed into many Uralic languages, e.g. Finnish sarvi, Hungarian szarv, both 'horn'). But a Beijing pentaglot dictionary equates these five terms:
- Chinese shényáng 'divine goat'
- Manchu shengkitu
- Tibetan bse-ru
- Mongol serü görügesü (the second word means 'beast')
- Turkish äigilik käyik 'auspicious beast'
The word for '
eland' is
bulan in most
Turkic languages, but the poet
Qashghari used
bulan for a unicorn, saying it lived in the land of the
Qipchaq, and in its horn
rain and
snow collected, so that they can
drink from each other.
The material I've used is mainly taken from an article by Denis Sinor, Sur les noms altaïques de la licorne, originally published in 1960 in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlands. I have supplemented by checking some on-line dictionaries, but these are seldom sufficient to help with mediaeval texts.
Thanks to wukong888 for help with identifying shén. Sinor has chen in Wade-Giles with no tone-marks and is blurred. I think it is probably shén.