Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den | Hacker News Reader

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

en.wikipedia.org

49 pointsbenbreen14 comments

> "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...

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.

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...

There are only 3 meanings used in that sentence.

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)

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

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!

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.

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...

Or in a different system here: 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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