Re: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ

Indeed it was artificial -- it was not an actual Classical Chinese
poem, but written in the Republican period in support of abolishing
the use of Classical Chinese and switching over to the vernacular.

Eugene

2007/5/24, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>:
> On 5/23/07, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den#The_text
>
> A very artificial sample, though, since as I understand it, the text
> would not be understood by a Chinese person when read out loud --
> Chinese uses two- or more character words partly to disambiguate such
> homophones in current Chinese.
>
> Again as I understand it, the text is written in older Chinese
> (Classical Chinese?), in which such "reduced" constructions are
> possible -- but at the time that sort of language would have been
> spoken, there were more endings, so the characters wouldn't have been
> homophones of one another. (And, indeed, they are not in other
> dialects which have retained some of the endings, e.g. Cantonese.)
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>