Re: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ

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@...>

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