On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 10:36:00PM +0200, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
KiSha no KiSha ga KiSha de KiSha shita.
- Kokoo kokoon koko kokko.
- Koko kokkoko?
- Koko kokko.
It was said after the Chairman Mao came into power, the Communist
Party considered outlawing Kanji (Han'Zi) altogether, and switch
to latin-letter basic HanYu PinYin system.
But the legendary Prof. Zhao Yuan-Ren (the first modern Chinese
linguist, translator extraordinarie) composed "The Tale of Mr.
Shi's Lion-eating endeavor" to demonstrate the impossibility of
reducing Chinese to phonetic symbols.
The original text appeared in an earlier edition of Encyclopedia
Britannica, and is available here (in big5):
L<http://www.pu.edu.tw/~chinese/Language/A01.htm>.
And the HanYu PinYin rendering goes like below, with my translation:
Shi2 Shi4 Shi1 Shi4 Shi1 Shi4 Shi4 Shi1,
Shi4 Shi2 Shi2 Shi1.
Shi4 Shi2 Shi2 Shi4 Shi4 Shi4 Shi1.
The stone-room poet Mr. Shi was obsessed with lion meat,
and swore to eat ten lions.
He visits market from time to time to look for lions.
Shi2 Shi2, Shi4 Shi2 Shi1 Shi4.
Shi4 Shi2, Shi4 Shi1 Shi4 Shi4 Shi4.
Shi4 Shi4 Shi4 Shi2 Shi:
Shi4 Shi3 Shi4, Shi3 Shi4 Shi2 Shi1 Shi4 Shi4.
At ten o'clock, ten lions happened to arrive to the market.
At that time, Mr. Shi happened to visit the market.
He gazed toward the ten lions:
With the power of arrows, he killed those ten lions dead.
Shi4 Shi2 Shi4 Shi2 Shi1 Shi1, Shi4 Shi2 Shi4.
Shi2 Shi4 Shi1, Shi4 Shi3 Shi4 Shi4 Shi2 Shi4.
Shi2 Shi4 Shi4, Shi4 Shi3 Shi4 Shi2 Shi2 Shi1 Shi1.
He carried the corpse of those ten lions, and went back to the stone room.
The stone room was moist; he ordered servants to wipe the stone room dry.
As the room was wiped, he begins attempting to eat the ten lions' corpses.
Shi2 Shi2,
Shi3 Shi4 Shi4 Shi2 Shi1 Shi1
Shi2 Shi2 Shi2 Shi1 Shi1
At the time of eating,
He suddenly realizes the corpses of ten lions
are actually corpses of ten stone lions.
Shi4 Shi4 Shi4 Shi4!
Try to explain this matter!
/Autrijus/
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