Many beginners learning Chinese may have encountered this curse: "四是四,十是十,十四是十四,四十是四十" (sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí), which translates to "four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty."
Chinese is certainly a language packed with homophones, particularly for those not practiced in distinguishing between tones. If you survived the last tongue twister and didn't at all bite your tongue, try the following advanced version:
shī shì shí shī shǐ
shí shì shī shì shī shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. shì shí shí 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 shì shì. shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì. shí shì shī, shì shǐ shì shì shí shì. shí shì shì, shì shǐ shì shí shí shī shī. shí shí, shǐ shì shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. shì shì shì shì.
To prove that this isn't mere gibberish, here's the original text written in Classic Chinese:
《施氏食狮史》
石室诗士施氏,嗜狮,誓食十狮.施氏时时适市视狮.十时,适十狮市.是时,适施氏适是市.施氏视十狮,恃矢势,使是十狮逝世.氏拾是十狮尸,适石室.石室湿,施氏使侍拭石室.石室拭,施氏始试食十狮尸.食时,始识十狮实十石狮尸.试释是事.
If you are curious about what on earth it could possibly mean, a translation is available, though, well, it does sound a bit like gibberish at times.
The Story of the Stone Grotto Poet Eating Lions
Stone Grotto post Shih by name was fond of lions and swore he would eat ten lions. The man from time to time went to the market to look at lions. When, at ten o'clock, he went to the market, it happened that ten lions went to the market. At this time the man looked at the ten lions and, relying on the moment of ten stone arrows, caused the ten lions to depart from this world. The man picked these ten lions' bodies and went to the stone grotto. The stone grotto was wet and he made the servant try to wipe the stone grotto. The stone grotto having been wiped, the man began to try to eat the ten lions' bodies. When he ate them, he began to realize that those ten lions' bodies were really ten stone lions' bodies. Now he began to understand that that was the fact of the case. Try and explain this matter.
The author of the text was Zhao Yuanren (赵元任). As the "father of Chinese linguistics", he speaks eight nation's languages as well as 33 Chinese dialects. But besides his unparalleled linguistic talent, Zhao also has a genius for whimsicality.
The "story of eating lions" is not the only gimmick he played with, and I'm not just referring to three other tongue twisters he wrote with syllables "ji", "xi" and "yi" (see the bottom of this post). One of his proudest accomplishments was the translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland into Chinese, and during his six decades of teaching career as the professor of physics, mathematics, Chinese music and Chinese linguistics in Harvard, Cornell and UC Berkeley, one of his most delightful feats on the lecture circuit was to record on tape a discourse of English (a passage, a poem) uttered backwards. The tape was then played in reverse to reveal perfectly natural English pronunciation, and he would be laughing in tears when looking at his astounded students.
Story of Stone Grotto Poet Eating Lions was written originally not for fun, but as a weapon in the "revolution of Chinese characters". The phonetic letters in Chinese—pinyin (拼音, pīn yīn) was an invention in modern times. In the past, Chinese ancestors used neither pinyin nor punctuation marks. Zhao developed the National Romanisation (Zhao Yuan Ren's Romanisation), a phonetic alphabet designed for Chinese language, an effort that met huge obstacles from conservative literati who urged to keep the traditional language "clean" from the western Latin letters. The four stories, written with quasi homophones, were thus to prove the relative independence between the tones and meanings of the Chinese language. Zhao's romanisation was adopted nationwide in 1928, which through much simplification evolved into the system we are using today.
