I can't resist mentioning the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den poem I came across recently. The poet plays with the many tones and many variants of the sound 'sh' in Chinese:
« 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 shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
Translation:
« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
In a stone den was a poet called 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.
Note that this poem isn't in any "real" Chinese language. Basically, it's written in Classical Chinese, but pronounced as if it were Mandarin.
Old Chinese (the spoken language on which the written Classical form was based) had a much more complex phonology, which was simplified in Mandarin, resulting in many Old Chinese words becoming homophones or near homophones. To reduce the ambiguity, Mandarin uses many more compound words than Classical Chinese.
For example, a poet is called shīrén in Mandarin (literally, "poet person") while this poem just uses shī.
