HONG KONG — China said goodbye to the Year of the Horse on Wednesday, and on the first day of the new lunar year revelers welcomed the Year of the Sheep.

Or maybe the goat. Or perhaps the ram.

For English speakers, it is a can of worms.

“Few ordinary Chinese are troubled by the sheep-goat distinction,” Xinhua, China’s main state-run news agency, said in its report on the debate. “However, the ambiguity has whipped up discussion in the West.”

The reason is that the word for the eighth animal in the Chinese zodiac’s 12-year cycle of creatures, yang in Mandarin, does not make the distinction found in English between goats and sheep and other members of the Caprinae subfamily. Without further qualifiers, yang might mean any such hoofed animal that eats grass and bleats. And so Chinese news outlets have butted heads for days on what to call this year in English, recruiting experts to pass judgment.

“The yang possesses a rich and complex meaning in the minds of Chinese people,” said The Beijing Daily, mustering the kind of grandiloquence that journalists can resort to during a slow news patch. “It has permeated every corner of our lives. Some say that in a sense, Chinese culture is not the culture of the dragon or the tiger, but the culture of the yang.”