perl-unicode

Re: So many Dans!

2002-03-27 02:02:11
On Tue, 26 Mar 2002 11:31:59 +0800, autrijus(_at_)autrijus(_dot_)org (Autrijus
Tang) wrote:

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>.

Is that text in wenyan? Or do people really speak like that? After all,
people have to be able to understand one another, so they develop ways
of disambiguating homophones (such as making up 'words' from two or more
characters which mean similar things), which could also be used in
Pinyin or whatever transliteration scheme one wanted.

Shi4 Shi4 Shi4 Shi4!

    Try to explain this matter!

Would people really understand such a sentence if they heard it spoken
to them and didn't see the characters used to write it?

Cheers,
Philip

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