cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30396216
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Yeah, Chinese is good for these too. The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is my favourite. The full text in pinyin is:
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.
Edit: The English for anyone interested: In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict and had resolved to eat ten lions. He often went to the market to look for lions. At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market. At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market. He saw those ten lions and, using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp. So he asked his servants to wipe it. After wiping the stone den, he tried to eat those ten lions. When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were, in fact, ten stone lion corpses. Try to explain this matter.
.... what!? Guess that's a language I will definitely never learn.
It's only 4 tones. If you think of it like music, it's not too hard. The hardest part is converting characters into English into pinyin back into the characters.
Don't feel intimidated if you have any curiosity about learning the language. From an outside perspective, all languages are immensely complicated. In fairness, even native Chinese speakers wouldn't be able to comprehend the poem above when spoken aloud. It's designed specifically to mess with people and make them think about language. I love poems like this but there's an argument that they are disingenuous and exaggerate the difficulty of learning a language.
You clearly know English, so as a counterexample to show what you are capable of, take a minute to check out The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
"Shi" will always be the word I use to audtitorilly identity Mandarin. Sorry if this is random, but do you know of any areas outside of mainland China that use "Shi?'
I know Japan uses it numerically, and Korea uses it similarly, but I'm genuinely curious.
There are many homonyms in Chinese languages, though the poem above cheats a little because many aren't genuinely homonyms due to the different tones, also, many of the characters used aren't modern characters that are used in every day speech.
'Shi' isn't in Mandarin only. There is significant overlap with other Chinese languages, so there are going to be many words with the same sounds, some of the words in the poem above will sounds identical in Cantonese for instance.
'Shi' is also used extensively in Japanese (sometimes even overlapping with Chinese). In addition to being used 'numerically', it can be used to emphasize a point, to connect two words, and can be used for several completely different words e.g. death, poem, city.