
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
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knodi123
> "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a
> grammatically correct sentence in American English, often presented as an
> example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated
> linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in
> literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri
> Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

~~~
jpatokal
The big difference is that in Chinese, the written form of the poem is clear
and unambiguous (if not terribly sensible), whereas in English that makes no
sense without a detailed explanation of how you're supposed to parse it.

~~~
coldtea
Yeah, I doubt anybody in real life (as opposed in an academic setting, or
after having read this) ever actually knew more than 2 or 3 of those contrived
definitions of buffalo (basically the animal and the place) needed to make
this work...

~~~
hammock
There are only 3 meanings used in that sentence.

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coldtea
Looked it up and you're right, I remembered it as having more, but those (what
was more) where the roles played by each of the repetitions of the 3 basic
meanings (noun, verb, relative clause, verb phrase -- "buffalo", "buffaloed"
(bullied), "from Buffalo", "to buffalo", "that's a bufallo (bully)", etc)

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nwatson
I'd like to hear this poem recited ... found it at YouTube link:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4)

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tvphan
Similar to how Singaporean English have dropped a bunch of ending consonants
from English, Mandarin dropped a bunch of ending consonants from Middle
Chinese. If you recited this in Cantonese (which is a bit more conservative
dialect), the words would sound differently!

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tanilama
Worth noting, that this poem only makes sense in its written form, not spoken
form.

Had Chinese gone full Romanization, or some kinda phonetic written system, the
trick would be lost.

~~~
aasasd
Wikipedia doesn't have the text for fear of copyright, but you can see a
phonetic/romanized version here: [https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-
language-tonality-lion...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinese-language-
tonality-lion-eating_1526691.html)

Or in a different system here: [http://www.fa-
kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML](http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML)

And there's a link to a reading in another comment.

While a part of the effect is that each hieroglygh is read the same, I'd say
another part is that it still comes out making sense.

Seeing as modern English approaches being logographic, with its _“spelled
‘Manchester’, pronounced ‘Liverpool’,”_ I wonder how many homophones and
oronyms can be jammed into a phrase.

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peterburkimsher
That's a fun poem for making your Chinese-speaking friends laugh. For English
speakers, a similar kind of tongue-twister is The Chaos (Dearest Creature in
Creation):

[https://www.hep.wisc.edu/~jnb/charivarius.html](https://www.hep.wisc.edu/~jnb/charivarius.html)

I'm (still) trying to learn Chinese, using my own web app to split words,
romanise them, and translate them separately.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

The hardest challenge for Chinese NLP is word spacing. I'm amazed that they
still haven't welcomed the space character. English without spaces could be
really confusing! Consider what happened with URLs:
"thepenismightierthanthesword", "expertsexchange", "psychotherapist". That's
amusing for single words, but I wonder if we could go longer.

If there's any poets here, I'd like to hear your best examples of English
sentences that make sense, but with a different meaning, if spaces were added
in different places.

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haskal
You wrote Pingtype? I _love_ Pingtype! It is a pinned tab on my browser
because I come across Chinese words so often (fellow learner here!)

I think not spacing Chinese is a problem that gets solved through experience.
The word groupings will be of 2-3 characters max unlike English where words
can be 1-12 letters long (unless it is for nouns like 喜马拉雅 = xi3ma3la1ya3 =
Himalaya).

The examples you gave are edge cases but I am sure you can read
"butishouldstoptypingnow" just fine. You never though to segment the word as
"bu-tish-ould..." because you have an expectation of sentence and type of
words that fill positions in the "<conjunction> <subject> <aux verb>
<verb>..." format.

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peterburkimsher
Wow, really? I have a user?! You seriously just made my day!

I've wasted so much time on that side project, to finally hear that someone
else cares about it is so encouraging. Please email me - I've got lots more
Pingtype data that I collected and parsed, but didn't upload yet.

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canjobear
Where’s the text of the poem? This article used to have the text, along with
transcriptions in Mandarin and Cantonese.

~~~
hammock
As the wikipedia article explains, the Chinese text is unremarkable. But
here's the poem spoken - it's actually pretty good.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4)

And an English translation:

In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had
resolved to eat ten lions. He often went to the market to look for lions. At
ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market. At that time, Shi had
just arrived at the market. He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty
arrows, caused the ten lions to die. He brought the corpses of the ten lions
to the stone den. The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions. When he ate,
he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses. Try to
explain this matter.

