The Lion Eating Poet; a Quick Background:
Chinese is a tonal language. Which means that each sound can be pronounced in a number of different ways depending upon the inflection the speaker places on the syllable. A upward, downward, peaked or even inflection can change the word entirely. Unlike English where homonyms (words pronounced the same but spelled differently) like “flower” and “flour” are about as creative as it gets, Chinese is also very contextual, the word’s can change meaning depending on what precedes and follows them, so much more variation can be derived from the same base sounds.
Using some creative linguistic flexibility Yuen Ren Chao wrote this fantastic poem that describes the bizarre tale of a lion-eating poet, reportedly to spoof the idea of converting Chinese characters into a phonetic Latin alphabet equivalent. The 93 word essay is composed of the same repeated sound only varying in tone (so it is unreadable in other dialects like Cantonese). Remarkable from a linguistic standing, the poem shows just how difficult it can be to translate from one language to another.
I must say I am impressed as the only English equivalent I have come across is the sentence “
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” which means “Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also happen to intimidate other bison in their community”. Not quite the same flare as the Lion eating poet, but i’ll chalk that up to a limitation of our language.
Frank says: This is really amazing for a language buff like me. I would really like to find a Chinese speaking person who would read this for me. It's kind of hard to believe really but then again language is a pretty incredible thing, isn't it?
Wait! I live in the 21st century... I will see if a machine can convince me that the story really is all SHE's cracked up to be !
I found the characters in copyable form here:
I will paste the characters here too if I can...
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。
Here's another strange language puzzle, in English. If done correctly, the same word appears 11 times in a row. Not as cool as Chinese, but English is cool in other ways, isn't it?
Can you punctuate this sentence so it makes sense?
"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher".
