A Mouthful of Stones

From the Language section of A Better Guide to Běijīng

Here’s a story in Mandarin that’s intended to illustrate a point:

Shī Shì Shí Shī Shǐ.

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.

Very funny, no? Oh. You need help in understanding? See this video of someone reading it out loud: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWFNhuDQ0Tc

Clear now?

The author, Zhào Yuánrèn (趙元任), also known as Yuan Ren Chao (1892–1982), was one of the young Chinese whose studies in the US were paid for by the Boxer Indemnity Fund which returned to China money paid in reparation for the Siege of the Legations (see A Brief History of Běijīng). He left China in 1910 to study at Cornell University and went on to become a mathematician, poet, philosopher, musician, and linguist who travelled back and forth between China and the US, teaching at Harvard, Tsinghua, and UC Berkeley.

He acted as Bertrand Russell’s interpreter during that philosopher’s visit to China in 1920, was involved in Harvard’s Chinese dictionary programme, wrote popular songs, and made a translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Chinese in 1922. Àilìsī Mànyóu Qíjìng Jì (爱丽丝漫游奇境记) went into multiple editions and temporarily made Àilìsī a popular name for little girls. He also invented new characters to translate the portmanteau words (e.g. brillig, slithy) in Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

He experimented with a system for reducing 10,000 commonly used characters to merely 2000, and invented alternative systems for writing Mandarin with the Roman alphabet, although these were never widely adopted. One of them avoided the use of diacriticals (tone-marks) altogether by indicating the tones using different letters. Another system could be used to transliterate all variants and dialects of Chinese and not merely Mandarin. His texts for students of Mandarin remained in common use into the 1980s.

His point here was that transliteration into phonetic script would never successfully convey the meaning of Chinese by itself, and nor does the spoken form alone. The characters are essential for the accurate conveyance of meaning. Even then Chinese can be unwieldy and misleading, but the meaning of the following is at least clear:

施氏食狮史.

石室诗士施氏, 嗜食狮, 誓食十狮. 适施氏时时适市视狮. 十时，适十狮适市. 是时, 适施氏适市. 氏视是十狮, 恃矢势，使是十狮逝世. 氏拾是十狮尸, 适石室. 石室湿, 氏使侍拭石室. 石室拭, 氏始试食是十狮尸. 食时, 始识是十狮尸, 实十石狮尸. 试释是事.

Or clear-ish. There are certain archaisms, and no one would speak quite this way today. A very rough translation would be:

The Story of Master Shī Eating Lions.

A poet called Shī who lived in a stone house liked eating lions, and vowed to eat ten of them. He often went to the market to look for lions. At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market at the same time as Shī. He saw these ten lions and relied on his arrows to kill them. He brought the bodies of the ten lions to the stone room. The stone house was damp, so he asked his servants to wipe it. After the stone house was wiped, he tried to eat the ten lions. When he started to eat, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lions. Try to explain this business.

And the explanation is that if you want to be sure of making yourself clear in Chinese, then you have to learn to write it.

How Chinese Works
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