Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
Some years ago, when I first began a course in Mandarin Chinese at Defense Language Institute, I was highly sceptical that a language with such a great number of homophones could possibly work effectively. In the Chinese-English dictionary I received, meant for students and with a rather meagre word stock, the Pinyin-romanized syllable ‘shì’ (IPA /ʂz̩/ with falling tone) had 42 or so meanings, ranging from the copula to ‘stone’ to ‘matter, affair’. Even worse, native speakers of Cantonese tend to pronounce standard Mandarin /sz̩/ and /ʂz̩/ identically when they speak Mandarin, further increasing homophony and making ordering in a Chinese restaurant in the West—generally staffed by Southerners—an enormous annoyance for me. It is understood that earlier forms of Chinese permitted a much greater amount of syllables than Mandarin, and this homophony is a relatively recent phenomenon, by which I mean it has come about only in the last thousand years. As I progressed in my studies, I found that the spoken language has ways of surmounting the challenges posed by homophony, and I forgot about the problem for a time.
The poet Zhao Yuanren, writing at the turn of the 20th century, created a poem with 92 Chinese characters, undoubtedly pronounced distinctly in early Chinese, but all read as /ʂz̩/ in modern Mandarin, differing only in tone. “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” would be read aloud as follows by a Mandarin speaker:
shi2 shi4 shi1 shi4 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi1. shi4 shi2 shi2 shi1. shi4 shi2 shi2 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi1 shi2 shi2. shi4 shi2 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2. shi4 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi1. shi4 shi3 shi4 shi3 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi1shi1. shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi1. shi4 shi3 shi4 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi4. shi4 shi3 shi4 shi2 shi4 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi2 shi2. shi3 shi4 shi3 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi2 shi2 shi2 shi1 shi1 shi4 shi4 shi4 shi4
The Wikipedia article on the subject includes a transcription of how the poem would be read by a speaker of Taiwanese, showing that not all Chinese dialects have succumbed to the same tendency to homophony as Mandarin.
July 16th, 2005 at 02:23
That is WILD!
October 22nd, 2005 at 20:34
[...] Like Zhao Yuanren, whose poem “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” I presented here several months ago, the linguist Y.R. Chao also composed several Chinese works written only with characters that are (excepting tones) homophones in Mandarin and therefore would ultimately make no sense if read aloud. Here’s an example: 西溪犀、喜嬉戲。嵇熙夕々携犀戲。嵇熙細々習洗犀。犀吸溪、戲襲熙。嵇熙嘻々希息戲。惜熙嘶々喜襲熙。 [...]
January 21st, 2007 at 14:51
As the Wikipedia article explains in some detail, the style of the poem (of which several different versions with different endings exist!) is extreme even within Classical Chinese. The syllable shi, BTW, is pronounced somewhere between [ʂɯ] and [ʂʉ] by most native Mandarin speakers; very few make the vowel rhotic, and I haven’t come across any that use a syllabic [z] as you write, or syllabic [ʐ] as you probably wanted to write. Have you? — Si is [sɯ].