Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

Uncommon card · No. 92872

"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" (traditional Chinese: 施氏食獅史; simplified Chinese: 施氏食狮史; lit. 'The Story of Mr. Shi Eating Lions') is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese, with two versions composed of 92 and 94 Chinese characters respectively, which are all pronounced shi ([ʂɻ̩]) when read in Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing. The poem was originally written by Hu Mingfu (胡明复) and published by linguist Yuen Ren Chao in Volume 11 of The Chinese Students's Monthly in 1916. The poem was then refined by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1930s for demonstrative purposes in his lectures, and he later used it 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...

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