Free The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth Page B

shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shī shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shī shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shī shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
    Which means:
In a stone den was a poet named Shi, who loved to eat lions, and had decided to eat ten.
He often went to the market to hunt for lions.
At ten o’clock precisely, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that moment, Shi had just arrived at the market as well.
Seeing those lions, he shot them with his arrows.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was wet, so he had his servant clean it.
After the stone den was cleaned, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realised the corpses were really ten stone lions.
Try to explain this matter.
    That’s one hell of a case of antanaclasis. However, like the buffalo sentence, it makes no sense, even to the Chinese, unless it’s explained.

China
    Westerners find it terribly hard to pronounce Chinese words, and the Chinese find it hard to pronounce ours. In the nineteenth century when British merchants were over in China trying to trade opium, they found that the locals couldn’t even say the word business , and instead pronounced it pidgin , which is why strange colonial dialects are still called pidgin English .
    And we’re so bad at pronouncing Chinese that when we want one of their phrases we don’t adopt them as we would a French one, we just give in and translate. Do you have any idea how to pronounce xi nao ? Luckily, you don’t need to, as we translated it to brainwashing (it was originally a form of Buddhist meditation). We never lost face by trying to pronounce tiu lien , instead we took the phrase and translated it to lose face . As for Mao Tse Tung’s tsuh lao fu , we call them paper tigers .
    However, some Chinese words do get into the language, mostly because of the delicious food. These remain untranslated, which is generally a good thing. Kumquats and dim sum might sell more if English-speakers knew that they meant golden orange and touch the heart ; however, fish brine would probably not sell as much as ketchup , odds and ends (basically leftovers) doesn’t sound as exotic as chop suey , and nobody would eat tofu if they knew that it meant rotten beans .
    However, as alien as the Chinese language may sound to Western ears, there are still some points where we can see that our languages connect, not because they are related (they aren’t) but because humans form languages in the same way, for example by imitation of sound. That’s why the Chinese word for cat is miau .
    And here’s a true oddity: the Chinese word for pay is pei .

Coincidences and Patterns
    The Chinese for pay is pei , and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad . The Uzbek for chop is chop , and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog . The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani . When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show ; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well .
    Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realise that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We’re bound to coincide sometimes.
    To prove that two languages are related you need to show a pattern of changes. It’s not enough to say that the Latin word collis has a double L in it and so does hill . That wouldn’t convince anyone of anything. But it’s possible to show that hundreds of Latin words that begin with a hard C have German and English equivalents that begin with an H. Moreover, you discover that the rest of the consonants are pretty much unchanged. So the Latin cornu translates to Old German and English as horn . If you can show a pattern of changes, then