Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

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Template:Short description Template:Infobox Chinese "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese, composed of around 92 to 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced shi (Template:IPAc-cmn) when read in modern Standard Chinese, with only the tones differing.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

The poem was originally written by Hu Mingfu 胡明复 and published by Yuen Ren Chao in Volume 11 of The Chinese Students's Monthly in 1916.<ref name="hu">Zhao, Z. (2024) ‘赵元任之同音字文章与汉字拼音化 ——以《施氏食狮史》为中心 [Zhàoyuánrèn zhī tóngyīn zì wénzhāng yǔ hànzì pīnyīn huà ——yǐ “shī shì shí shī shǐ” wéi zhōngxīn]’, 实验语言学 [Shíyàn yǔyán xué], 13(3).</ref><ref>Chao, Yuen Ren, & Suh, Hu. (1916). The Problem of the Chinese Language. The Chinese Students’ Monthly, XI(8), 567–593. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Chinese_Students_Monthly/hCrWMhU7RLgC?hl=en&gbpv=0</ref> It was then refined by linguist Yuen Ren Chao in the 1930s for demonstrative purposes in his lectures, and later used to argue the limits of the Romanization of Chinese. The poem is coherent and grammatical in Literary Chinese, but due to the number of Chinese homophones, it becomes difficult to understand in oral speech. In Mandarin, the poem is incomprehensible when read aloud, since only four syllables cover all the words of the poem. The poem is somewhat more comprehensible when read in other varieties such as Cantonese, in which it has 22 different syllables, or Hokkien, in which it has 15 different syllables.

Background

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is an example of a one-syllable article, a form of constrained writing possible in tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, where tonal contours expand the range of meaning for a single syllable.

The poem was among three that Yuen Ren Chao would share in Language Problems (Template:Zh, 1968), the others being Aunt Yi (漪姨 Yī yí) and Record of the Hungry Chickens Perching on the Machine (Template:Zh).<ref name="yywt">Template:Cite book</ref> Yuen Ren Chao went on to produce "Ji Ji hit the Chicken" (Template:Lang; jì jī jī jī jì) in "Chinese culture in a Comparative perspective" (Template:Lang) the same year, which uses only the syllable /ji/. The written poem is easy to understand for those familiar with Chinese characters, each of which is associated with a distinct core meaning. It remains intelligible in its spoken form in varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin. However, in its romanized form or when spoken in Mandarin, it becomes confusing.<ref name=":2" />

Within Language Problems, Chao used the poems to clarify his argument about how Romanization of Chinese should proceed, after being misconstrued in a short interview. Specifically, he argued that romanizing Literary Chinese could not work, given the extremely different grammar and phonology the liturgical language represents; phonetically, it represents Old Chinese,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and grammatically, it mimics Classical Chinese, from the days of Confucius.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Therefore, whilst modern Mandarin Chinese's disyllabic structure makes it understandable when phoneticized, represented by the cyrillicized Dungan language, the Han script is still necessary to represent fields such as Chinese history, philology, and linguistics. This point is perfectly encapsulated by Literary Chinese, which, as this poem demonstrated, cannot be represented by Hanyu Pinyin or the aforementioned Dungan Cyrillic. However, as a proponent of Gwoyeu Romatzyh<ref name="yywt" /> and General Chinese,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Chao was not arguing against the phoneticization of Mandarin Chinese: He was merely showing the limits of what he was campaigning for, that being the phoneticization of Mandarin Chinese.<ref name="yywt" /><ref name=":2" />

Excerpt

The following is Hu Mingfu's 1916 draft, which was not perfectly homophonic, relying on an alternate reading for 似 sì and the character 設 shè to work:<ref name="hu" /><ref name="chao1916">Chao, Yuen Ren, & Suh, Hu. (1916). The Problem of the Chinese Language. The Chinese Students’ Monthly, XI(8), 567–593. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Chinese_Students_Monthly/hCrWMhU7RLgC?hl=en&gbpv=0</ref>

石室詩士史氏，嗜豕，失仕，誓食十獅。獅似嗜虱。史氏設寺，恃師勢，使施氏拾獅屍，俟食時，始識世事。史使侍逝適市，視施氏。試釋是事。
Shíshì shī shì shǐ shì, shì shǐ, shī shì, shì shí shí shī. Shī sì shì shī. Shǐ shì shè sì, shì shī shì, shǐ shī shì shí shī shī, shì shí shí, shǐ shí shìshì. Shǐ shǐ shì shì shì shì, shì shī shì. Shì shì shì shì.

This translates to:

Living in a stone den is a poet-scholar named Shi, addicted to pork. Having lost his official post, he vowed to eat 10 lions. The lions seemed inclined to interfere. Mr. Shi set up an office, and used his master's influence to dispatch a messenger named Shi to fetch lion corpses, awaiting his time to eat. Only upon eating did he begin to understand the ways of the world. Mr. Shi sent his envoy to the market to observe another man named Shi. Try to explain this matter.

The following is the first six characters of Chao's refined text in various romanization systems, including Gwoyeu Romatzyh and General Chinese, Chao's own romanization systems, as well as Chinese traditional/simplified characters.

Explanation

The Chinese languages are tonal Template:Ndash meaning that changes in pitch can change the meaning of words. When written using a romanized script, the poem is an example of Chinese antanaclasis.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref> The poem shows the flexibility of the Chinese language in many ways, including wording, syntax, punctuation, and sentence structures, which gives rise to various explanations.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

The poem can be interpreted as an objection to the romanization of Literary Chinese, demonstrating the author's critique of proposals to replace Chinese characters with Latin letters Template:Ndash a move that could potentially lead to the marginalization or elimination of traditional Chinese script. The 20th-century linguist Yuen Ren Chao utilized this poem to illustrate the complexities and unique attributes of the Chinese language, arguing that simplification and romanization would undermine its rich tonal and logographic system.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Evolution

As Old Chinese evolved into Middle Chinese and later Mandarin Chinese, it lost numerous affixes, final plosive syllables, and underwent tonogenesis, causing it to become a radically different language to what it was before.<ref name="behr2015" /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The loss of these older sound combinations in Chinese over the centuries has greatly increased the number of Chinese homophones; to compensate, classifiers<ref>Wang, L. (1994). Origin and development of classifiers in Chinese [PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University]. https://web.archive.org/web/20190711012236/https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file%3Faccession%3Dosu1487856076411916%26disposition%3Dinline</ref> and disyllabic words emerged. Many words in Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den had distinct sounds in Old Chinese, but over time, especially during the Middle Chinese period, varieties of Chinese emerged that had merged and split different sounds, themselves becoming mutually unintelligible.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Illustrating the divergence of these varieties, when the same passage is read in Cantonese there are seven distinct syllables—Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit—in six distinct tone contours, producing 22 distinct character pronunciations. In Southern Min, there are six distinct syllables—Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit, Template:Tlit—in seven distinct tone contours, producing fifteen character pronunciations. Therefore, the passage is barely comprehensible when read aloud in modern Mandarin without context, but easier to understand when read in other Sinitic languages, such as Cantonese.

The first line of the poem in reconstructed Old and Middle Chinese:

The same excerpt read in modern varieties of Chinese:

If the excerpt from is translated into modern Mandarin and spoken, it becomes fully comprehensible:

  • Traditional characters: Template:Zhi
  • Simplified characters: Template:Zhi
  • Pinyin: Template:Tlit
  • Bopomofo: ㄧㄡˇ ㄧ ㄨㄟˋ ㄓㄨˋ ㄗㄞˋ ㄕˊ ㄕˋ ㄌㄧˇ ㄉㄜ˙ ㄕ ㄖㄣˊ ㄐㄧㄠˋ ㄕ ㄕˋ

Reactions and commentary

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den has been widely circulated online for decades on both the western and Chinese internet. A reading was presented by Quan Hu on BBC News in 2016.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Lydia H. Liu of Columbia University used the text as an example when analysing A Book from the Sky (Template:Zh), a form of nonsense writing using largely illegitimate but possible Han characters. In her comparison, she notes the power the text has to express meaning in spite of its verbal incomprehensibility thanks to the characters, while A Book from the Sky captures the fascination of Chinese readers in spite of its incomprehensible characters. She goes on to use this to make a case for nonsense writing possibly being a mathematical rather than linguistic phenomenon; Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is not nonsense because its meaning can be expressed through characters that are readable, while A Book from the Sky is nonsense because it has unreadable characters. Despite this, it is not immediately noticeable as nonsense as the Han characters within are technically possible within the writing system.<ref>Liu, L.H. (2009) ‘The Non-Book, or the Play of the Sign’, in Cayley, J. et al., Tianshu: passages in the making of a book...in conjunction with an exhibition on the making of Book from the Sky at Bernard Quaritch March 18th 2009. Edited by K. Spears. Translated by D. Hammond. London: Quaritch.</ref>

See also

References

Template:Reflist

Further reading

  • Rogers, Henry (2005). Writing systems: a linguistic approach. Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-23463-0. p. 30
  • Chao, Yuen Ren (趙元任) (1968). 語言問題 [Yuyan wenti]. 臺灣商務印書館 [The Commercial Press (Taiwan)]. ISBN 957-05-0577-X. P. 143 Google Books
  • 曾新，褚颖编．新文科特色创新课程系列教材 比较视野中的中国文化[M]．上海：上海三联书店，2022.10：50-51
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