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The famous text of the Lion-eating Poet in a Stone Den (above - read in columns from right) was a demonstration example written at the turn of the 2oth century by Chao Yuen-Ren. With his essay, the eminent linguist tried to spoof the idea of converting Chinese character text into a phonetic (e.g. Latin alphabetic) system. (The Pinyin romanization had been introduced half a century later in the People's Republic for auxiliary purposes.) The essay is 93 words long. Since every word is pronounced alike (except the tone), the entire essay becomes utterly unreadable in Mandarin. (Besides, I also really doubt if it's comprehensible when spoken...) This is different when spoken in Southern dialects - compare with the sound sample in Cantonese (see below).
If I 've counted right, the text includes 32 different characters, yet there hadn't been any need to come to an end with the story as there are at least 39 more Chinese words all pronounced "shih".
It's
Mandarin Chinese pronunciation only differs in tone (1 to 4)
Here is my translation:
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Shishi shishi ...
My own short version and whole text by Dr. Siu-Leung Lee
whole
text in Cantonese
S.L. Lee ©
2001
(Back to Poem & Tongue Twister Audio samples)