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hinese has a high tolerance for homophones. Classical Chinese was even more notorious in this regard, and the great, playful 20th-century Chinese-American linguist Zhào Yuánrèn demonstrated this tendency in his well-known-for-this-reason poem The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. Would it pique your interest to peek at the peak of Chinese homophony? If I raise this issue, will rays of rebuttal raze it to the ground? If I write right, like a wright, and not as a mere rite, will it instill a whit of wit? Shut up? OK, here's the poem:
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.
And here's the gimmick of the poem: every single word in it is pronounced "shi" (which sounds vaguely like "sure") in one or another of the tones! Behold as this brave girl reads it aloud:
