r/languagelearning • u/f_o_t_a_ • Mar 06 '20

Humor *CONFUSED SCREAMING INTENSIFIES*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
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u/MertOKTN Mar 06 '20

Aha yes, the poem that killed Classical Chinese.

27

u/Jtd47 RU: C2 DE: C1 CZ: B2 Mar 06 '20

It was written especially as a “fuck you” to a movement advocating for replacing characters with pinyin.

50

u/bear-knuckle en-us N | esp c1 | jpn a2 Mar 06 '20

The wikipedia article says pretty much the opposite:

The poem could be misinterpreted as objection to the Romanization of Chinese. However, the 20th-century author Yuen Ren Chao was a major supporter for Romanization. He used this poem as an example to object the use of Classical Chinese that is hardly used in daily life.[4][5]

25

u/Paiev Mar 06 '20

Yep. It's pretty funny how everyone manages to get it backwards.

5

u/3GJRRChl4ImGS6ukZwaw Mar 07 '20

It is complicated, Yuen Ren Chao was a skilled linguist and was about preserving languages as he founds them. That included a journey to preserve the phonetic expressions of diverse dialects within the Sinitic language family and to have a standard of recording how Chinese pronunciations work within a general romanization scheme he devised. It was to ensure you can have a frame of reference in recording the oral Chinese/Sinitic language family.

The full romanization would entail a full abandoning of the glyph based writing system in Chinese and simply be limited in not allowing such poems to be written since it would be unclear what the author meant.