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Lion-Eating Poet In The Stone Den
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese, composed of around 92 to 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced ''shi'' () when read in modern Standard Chinese, with only the tones differing. The poem was written in the 1930s by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao as a linguistic demonstration. The poem is coherent and grammatical in Literary Chinese, but due to the number of Chinese homophones, it becomes difficult to understand in oral speech. In Mandarin, the poem is incomprehensible when read aloud, since only four syllables cover all the words of the poem. The poem is somewhat more comprehensible when read in other varieties such as Cantonese, in which it has 22 different syllables, or Hokkien, in which it has 15 different syllables. Yuen Ren Chao went on to produce "Ji Ji hit the Chicken" (; ''jì jī jī jī jì'') in "Chinese culture in a Comparative perspective" () the same year, wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Narrative Poem
Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need to rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be complex. It is normally dramatic, with various characters. Narrative poems include all epic poetry, and the various types of "lay", most ballads, and some idylls, as well as many poems not falling into a distinct type. Some narrative poetry takes the form of a novel in verse. An example of this is '' The Ring and the Book'' by Robert Browning. In terms of narrative poetry, romance is a narrative poem that tells a story of chivalry. Examples include the '' Romance of the Rose'' or Tennyson's '' Idylls of the King''. Although those examples use medieval and Arthurian materials, romances may also tell stories from classical mythology. Sometimes, these short narratives are collected i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes Space (punctuation), space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guangdong Romanization
Guangdong Romanization refers to the four romanization schemes published by the Guangdong Provincial Education Department in 1960 for transliterating Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. The schemes utilized similar elements with some differences in order to adapt to their respective spoken varieties. In certain respects, Guangdong romanization resembles pinyin in its distinction of the alveolar initials ''z'', ''c'', ''s'' from the alveolo-palatal initials ''j'', ''q'', ''x'' and in its use of ''b'', ''d'', ''g'' to represent the unaspirated stop consonants . In addition, it makes use of the medial ''u'' before the rime rather than representing it as ''w'' in the initial when it follows ''g'' or ''k''. Guangdong romanization makes use of diacritics to represent certain vowels. This includes the use of the circumflex, acute accent and diaeresis in the letters ''ê'', ''é'' and ''ü'', respectively. In addition, it uses ''-b'', ''-d'', ''-g'' to represent the coda c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meixian Dialect
The Meixian dialect (; Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: Mòi-yan-fa; IPA: ), also known as Moiyan dialect, as well as Meizhou dialect (), or Jiaying dialect and Gayin dialect, Kayin dialect is the prestige dialect of Hakka Chinese. It is named after Meixian District, Meizhou, Guangdong. Sixian dialect (in Taiwan) is very similar to Meixian dialect. Phonology Source: Initials There are two series of stops and affricates in Hakka, both voiceless: tenuis // and aspirated //. * When the initials // , // , // , and // are followed by a palatal medial // , they become []/[] , []/[] , [] , and []/[] , respectively. Rimes Moiyan Hakka has seven vowels, , , , , , and , that are romanised as ii, i, ê, a, e, o and u, respectively. Finals Moreover, Hakka finals exhibit the final consonants found in Middle Chinese, namely which are romanised as m, n, ng, b, d, and g respectively in the official Moiyan romanisation. Tone Moiyan Hakka has six tones. The Middle Chinese fully voiced initial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peng'im
( zh, s=潮州话拼音方案, t=潮州話拼音方案: ( Teochew) ( Swatow), : or , : or ) is a Teochew dialect romanization system as a part of Guangdong Romanization published by Guangdong Provincial Education Department in 1960. The tone of this system is based on the Swatow dialect. The system uses the Latin alphabet to transcribe pronunciation and numbers to note tones. Before that, another system called , which was introduced by the missionaries in 1875, had been widely used. Since Teochew has high phonetic similarity with Hokkien, another Southern Min variety, and can also be used to transcribe Teochew. The name is a transcription of "" using this system. Contents Alphabet This system uses the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � . ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teochew Min
Teochew, also known as Swatow or Teo-Swa, is a Southern Min language spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as ''Chiuchow'', its Cantonese rendering, due to English romanization by colonial officials and explorers. It is closely related to Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with Hokkien. Teochew preserves many Old Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary that have been lost in some of the other modern varieties of Chinese. As such, Teochew is described as one of the most conservative Chinese languages. History and geography Historically, the Teochew prefecture included modern prefecture-level cities of Chaozhou, Jieyang and Shantou. In China, this region is now known as Teoswa. Parts of the Hakka-speaking Meizhou city, such as Dabu County and Fengshun, were also parts of the Teochew prefecture and contain pocket communities of Teochew speakers. As the Teo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pe̍h-ōe-jī
( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese and Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing systems for Southern Min. During its peak, it had hundreds of thousands of readers. Developed by Western missionary, missionaries working among the Chinese emigration, Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the 19th century and refined by missionaries working in Xiamen and Tainan, it uses a modified Latin alphabet and some diacritics to represent the spoken language. After initial success in Fujian, POJ became most widespread in Taiwan and, in the mid-20th century, there were over 100,000 people literate in POJ. A large amount of printed material, religious and secular, has been produced in the script, including Taiwan's first newspaper, the ''Taiwan Church News''. During Taiwan under Japanese rule, Japanese rule (1895–1945), the use of was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jyutping
The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, also known as Jyutping, is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed in 1993 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK). The name ''Jyutping'' (itself the Jyutping romanisation of its Chinese name, ) is a contraction of the official name, and it consists of the first Chinese characters of the terms ''jyut6 jyu5'' () and ''ping3 jam1'' (; pronounced '' pīnyīn'' in Mandarin). Despite being intended as a system to indicate pronunciation, it has also been employed in —in effect, elevating Jyutping from its assistive status to a written language. History The Jyutping system departs from all previous Cantonese romanisation systems (approximately 12, including Robert Morrison's pioneering work of 1828, and the widely used Standard Romanization, Yale and Sidney Lau systems) by introducing z and c initials and the use of eo and oe in finals, as well as replacing the initial y, used in all previous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Southern Min
Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan (many citizens are descendants of settlers from Fujian), Eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and Southern Zhejiang. Southern Min dialects are also spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, Southern Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Southern and Central Vietnam, as well as major cities in the United States, including in San Francisco, in Los Angeles and in New York City. Minnan is the most widely-spoken branch of Min, with approximately 34 million native speakers as of 2025. The most widely spoken Southern Min language is Hokkien, which includes Taiwanese. Other varieties of Southern Min have significant differences from Hok ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui dynasty, Sui and Tang dynasty, Tang dynasties. However, based on the preface of the ''Qieyun'', most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC). The ''fanqie'' method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century ''Yunjing'' and other r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as Southwestern Mandarin, those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Varieties Of Chinese
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin, Wu Chinese, Wu, Min Chinese, Min, Xiang Chinese, Xiang, Gan Chinese, Gan, Jin Chinese, Jin, Hakka Chinese, Hakka and Yue Chinese, Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese. Chinese varieties have the greatest differences in their phonology, and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax. Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
