False age

Basic explanation:

1. A method of calculating age. A person is counted as one year old when he is born, and then one year older every new year, which is one or two years older than his actual age, so it is called "false age".

2. Empty years. It is often used in conjunction with "无", which means that there are not enough years to go by.

Calculation: The year of birth is taken as one year, because it is the first year of a person's life, and is not related to the last year of pregnancy that has already been experienced.

Cultural background:

Why do the Chinese have a false year? This is a specious question. In ancient times, the Chinese had only this one way of counting age. Starting from modern times, the Western way of counting age gradually spread around the world and was introduced to China. As a result, there are two types of ageing in modern China. In order to differentiate between them, they are called imaginary age and weekly age. This gives the illusion that Chinese people have an extra year of age.

The following paragraphs, which seem to be expressing the ins and outs of the imaginary year, are scattered and mostly off-topic, and even uninformative, with the erroneous conclusion that the Chinese people take the Spring Festival as the birthday of every one of them, and failing to find out the real reason why the Chinese people calculate the order of the years at all. In fact, the Chinese not only did not take the Spring Festival as everyone's birthday, but from the Song Dynasty onwards, it was also gradually popular to celebrate birthdays.

The imaginary year is a unique Chinese way of counting age, so why does China have an imaginary year? To understand the false year, one must pay attention to two aspects of knowledge: the scientific knowledge of the ancient Chinese astronomical calendar, and the national character of the Chinese ancestors.

Ancient Chinese people did not have the modern concept of "birthday", and "birthday" is the closest meaning of the word "birth" or "birth". The closest word to the meaning of "birthday" is "birth" or "birthdate". The concept of birth and birthdays is not exactly the same as birthdays. Birthdays are the smallest unit of days, while births and birthdays are the smallest unit of hours (moments), and the ancients divided the day into twelve hours, which were represented by twelve branches of the earth's branches, known as the twelve hours of the day. In the ancient Chinese concept of birth, the date is only an element of the record of the birth time, and the year, month and hour are on a par with the month and hour, and does not have any emphasis; while the Western concept of birthday, emphasizing the month and date, so usually we say birthday, only say the months and days, do not say the year or the specific moment. This is another aspect of why the ancient Chinese did not emphasize the day of birth.

Closely related to the birth date is the phases of the genus. Genus sign is a way of keeping track of the year created by the ancient Chinese to record the year of a person's birth using twelve animal images as representatives

. Research has proved that the Chinese Zodiac is based on the stem and branch method of chronology, and the twelve animals correspond to the twelve earthly branches, with the animals as the signs of the earthly branches. People born in which year will have which year's Earthly Branches are matched with the animals, and thus the twelve animals are used to chronicle the year, the day and calculate the phases of each person's genus. Every person will have a fixed and unchanging zodiac sign. Therefore, when we ask a person about his or her horoscope, we often use the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches method to calculate his or her year of birth from his or her approximate age (when not used in conjunction with the word "she," the word "he" refers to both male and female).

In ancient Chinese legend, "Nian" is a monster that lives in the sea, with a long tentacled head, fierce and unusual, and every New Year's Eve, it comes ashore to devour livestock and hurt people. Legend has it that the "Year", written as "Sneaky", is a small demon with black body and white hands, which comes out every year on the night of New Year's Eve and specializes in maiming children. One possible explanation is that the reason why the ancients remembered the year according to the year is because the ancients did not have the abstract concept of time, and could only treat the year and the year as a kind of animal or demon, and the animal and the demon can not be split up, but can only be a whole year, and can only increase the year as a whole. This may be the origin of the Spring Festival to increase the year.

The significance of the Spring Festival having an increase in the number of years is actually implied in the various specific activities of celebrating the Spring Festival. Since ancient times, all parts of the country share the same New Year's custom, which in essence is to pay homage to the New Year. What is New Year's Eve? In traditional culture, paying New Year's visits involves walking among relatives in a family or clan, paying visits to elderly relatives, giving gifts, kowtowing, and blessings to the elderly; and at the same time accepting New Year's greetings from the children and giving them New Year's money. Why is there such an event? It is because this day is treated as everyone's birthday.