This is almost certainly written in literary classical Chinese (even if written recently). Basically, in Chinese, words that were once pronounced differently merged in pronunciation in modern Mandarin, though since the writing system is quite divorced from sound, the written forms never changed (at least, not until Simplified Chinese under Mao).
What that means is that a lot of classical Chinese literature has a bit of this problem, in that if you read it aloud, it is tricky to fully comprehend. (This poem/story takes it to an extreme, obviously.) For a long time, up through the early 20th century, it was fairly common for written things to be written in this literary Chinese even if the writer would say their ideas completely differently. A "write as you speak" movement has largely changed that: in modern written Mandarin, many words are two or three syllables long, and written with two or three characters. Etymologically, the words may have derived from compounding monosyllabic words, but in the modern spoken (and now also written) language, the sub-word syllables are simply no longer words in any meaningful sense.
(An analogy on a much smaller scale in English: many dialects of English merge /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before a nasal sound, so that "pin" and "pen" sound identical. Speakers of those dialects will often say "straight pin" or "ink pen" (or "pig pen" or "cow pen") to distinguish which kind of pin/pen they mean; they may or may not make the distinction in writing. So the writing is unambiguous, the speaking is unambiguous, but reading a written thing is ambiguous. When it's just one or two words it's no big deal, but imagine that nearly every word suffered from that problem....)
One solution to the "many characters sounding the same" problem was turning Chinese into a tonal language. I guess technically that makes them sound different. but even with tones (in modern mandarin Chinese there are 4 tones; in older time there were more; Cantonese reportedly still has 9).
Even with tones though, there are still too many characters sounding exactly the same. In a Chinese dictionary (you might want to pause for a moment and imagine what a Chinese dictionary looks like. if you come across an unknown English word in writing, you can look it up by spelling. but what's the equivalent thing to do for a chinese character?), under any one sound specification, you can easily find 10-20 characters.
where I disagree is that, yes, classic written Chinese is tricky to understand, but not in the sense that they are mostly one-syllable words. they are tricky to understand in the same sense that Shakespearean (or Chaucerian) English was tricky to understand to modern English speakers - due to unfamiliar vocabulary and old-style grammar. if this opinion is valid, I further propose that, when the Chinese talk, they might rely more heavily on semantics to parse sentences in real-time, since based on sound alone there might be too many character candidates. in other words, they use what's being talked about to do some pretty heavy-handed proning as they process incoming syllables.
On Chinese dictionaries. I actually don't think there is any difference from English ones, at least in the way I use them.
When I use an English dictionary I use the word's spelling. I don't check how the word is pronounced when I do this.
When I use a Chinese dictionary I use the number of strokes that make up the character, which puts all the characters in a sort of order not unlike an alphabetical one. I also do not need to know how the word is pronounced when I do this.
There is no such thing as "turning Chinese into a tonal language." Chinese is tonal to begin with. For native speakers, a different tone does sound as distinct as a different phoneme. The problem the poem exemplifies is the sort we run into when we reduce the language into only the phonetics -- a problem I'm not convinced is unique to Chinese. In fact, just the post above pointed to an example of such in English.
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This is almost certainly written in literary classical Chinese (even if written recently). Basically, in Chinese, words that were once pronounced differently merged in pronunciation in modern Mandarin, though since the writing system is quite divorced from sound, the written forms never changed (at least, not until Simplified Chinese under Mao).
What that means is that a lot of classical Chinese literature has a bit of this problem, in that if you read it aloud, it is tricky to fully comprehend. (This poem/story takes it to an extreme, obviously.) For a long time, up through the early 20th century, it was fairly common for written things to be written in this literary Chinese even if the writer would say their ideas completely differently. A "write as you speak" movement has largely changed that: in modern written Mandarin, many words are two or three syllables long, and written with two or three characters. Etymologically, the words may have derived from compounding monosyllabic words, but in the modern spoken (and now also written) language, the sub-word syllables are simply no longer words in any meaningful sense.
(An analogy on a much smaller scale in English: many dialects of English merge /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before a nasal sound, so that "pin" and "pen" sound identical. Speakers of those dialects will often say "straight pin" or "ink pen" (or "pig pen" or "cow pen") to distinguish which kind of pin/pen they mean; they may or may not make the distinction in writing. So the writing is unambiguous, the speaking is unambiguous, but reading a written thing is ambiguous. When it's just one or two words it's no big deal, but imagine that nearly every word suffered from that problem....)
EDIT: It turns out there's a Wikipedia page on the poem (naturally, should've checked that first). A lot of this is covered there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
One solution to the "many characters sounding the same" problem was turning Chinese into a tonal language. I guess technically that makes them sound different. but even with tones (in modern mandarin Chinese there are 4 tones; in older time there were more; Cantonese reportedly still has 9).
Even with tones though, there are still too many characters sounding exactly the same. In a Chinese dictionary (you might want to pause for a moment and imagine what a Chinese dictionary looks like. if you come across an unknown English word in writing, you can look it up by spelling. but what's the equivalent thing to do for a chinese character?), under any one sound specification, you can easily find 10-20 characters.
where I disagree is that, yes, classic written Chinese is tricky to understand, but not in the sense that they are mostly one-syllable words. they are tricky to understand in the same sense that Shakespearean (or Chaucerian) English was tricky to understand to modern English speakers - due to unfamiliar vocabulary and old-style grammar. if this opinion is valid, I further propose that, when the Chinese talk, they might rely more heavily on semantics to parse sentences in real-time, since based on sound alone there might be too many character candidates. in other words, they use what's being talked about to do some pretty heavy-handed proning as they process incoming syllables.
On Chinese dictionaries. I actually don't think there is any difference from English ones, at least in the way I use them. When I use an English dictionary I use the word's spelling. I don't check how the word is pronounced when I do this. When I use a Chinese dictionary I use the number of strokes that make up the character, which puts all the characters in a sort of order not unlike an alphabetical one. I also do not need to know how the word is pronounced when I do this.
There is no such thing as "turning Chinese into a tonal language." Chinese is tonal to begin with. For native speakers, a different tone does sound as distinct as a different phoneme. The problem the poem exemplifies is the sort we run into when we reduce the language into only the phonetics -- a problem I'm not convinced is unique to Chinese. In fact, just the post above pointed to an example of such in English.