鷖詣醫鷁憶: A One-Syllable Classical Chinese Poem in the Style of Yuen Ren Chao

Evans, L., (2025) “鷖詣醫鷁憶: A One-Syllable Classical Chinese Poem in the Style of Yuen Ren Chao”, Essex Student Journal 17(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.5526/esj.433

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Azel Geist for providing me with the inspiration to write this poem.

《鷖詣醫鷁憶·汐洛思》

鷖壹弋鷁，鷁殪，鷖逸。

鷖已唈，偯；疑，倚異意。

鷖詣醫鷁，鷁黓，翼黟。

鷁醫憶，“鷖異亄，齮肄！”

鷁醫咦：“噫！刈鷖翼！”

鷖佁肄譯，弋鷁，黟圛。

伊黓鷁殪。

以譯鷖。

“The Memory of a Seagull Visiting an Egret” by Llinos Evans

This poem’s rhyme cannot be replicated in English.

The Seagull single-mindedly hunts and shoots an Egret; the Egret falls, the Seagull flees.

Guilt chokes the Seagull: Alas! Paranoid, it leans on unusual thoughts.

The Seagull sees one Doctor Egret; Egret is skilled, wings black as naught.

Doctor Egret remembers: “Seagull is abhorrent, such biting cruelty!”

The Egret hisses: “Ah! Cut off Seagull’s wings, please!”

The Seagull hesitates, processing. Shooting the Egret dead, a dark mist falls coldly.

Try to interpret the Seagull.

Background: The One-Syllable Article

This poem takes inspiration from the work of Hu Mingfu and Yuen Ren Chao, a linguist who produced three one-syllable articles (同音文章 tóngyīn wénzhāng) poems. Starting in 1916, Chao published Hu Mingfu’s Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den《施氏食獅史》(Chao, 1916), which he would progressively refine over time. He later published Aunt Yi《漪姨》and Record of Chickens Perching on the Machine《飢雞集機記》in his book “Language Problems” 語言問題 (Chao, 1980). The trio were most famously showcased in one of his major works, Yuyan Wenti (Chao, 1968), though they were made at different times. Despite their strange names and even narratives, the symbolism is incredibly deep (Chao, 1980; Ceng and Chu, 2022)¹. He called them stories in his original text, but they are often referred to as, and in my opinion are, poems. He Hengxing (2018, 2019) has written admirable work on this subject, even showing ways to lengthen the work within the syntactic constraints.

Chao’s trilogy of works was originally made to demonstrate the homophony of Mandarin Chinese in comparison to Literary Chinese, within the context of a campaign to phoneticize Sinitic languages. Chao is often misconstrued here as being anti-romanisation entirely given the creation of these poems, with Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den being memetically² cited online as a titular example. However, this could not be further from the truth, and Chao himself notes such in Yuyan Wenti, believing to have been misrepresented by a rushed media interview. It should be noted that Chao himself was a proponent of romanisation, having been an architect of Gwoyeu Romatzyh (Chao, 1980) and General Chinese (Chao, 1983). Chao’s position was that he acknowledged that Chinese as a language family cannot be fully romanised: when studying philology, one should write in the script they are studying; when studying Chinese literature or history, characters are an obvious must; but in contexts such as science, engineering, agriculture, commerce, military affairs, and education, Chao believed his Gwoyeu Romatzyh was perfectly justified (Chao, 1980). It should nevertheless be noted that Sinitic languages already have some form of phoneticization: the Dungan language of the Mandarin family is cyrillized and has been for generations, and Southern Min often uses the Church Romanization promoted by missionaries due to the spoken word diverging too far from the Han script to fully map meanings anymore (Klöter, 2005). There is no greater case for the need for characters than Literary Chinese, where every character is of a single syllable, the syntax is based on Classical Chinese, and the script represents a semantic system that is fundamentally different to Mandarin Chinese (Chao, 1980; Fuller, 2024). This was Chao’s core argument: Literary Chinese is the absolute barrier in the pursuit of Chinese romanization.

Being made by a linguist, each of Chao’s works carries the same gimmick: every single syllable is the same, only differentiated by tone when read in Mandarin, yet they are all perfectly legible when read in Old or Middle Chinese. Ergo, should a Mandarin speaker hear these poems, they would sound completely incomprehensible. When one knows the characters and Literary Chinese, though, the meaning reveals itself. The goal of this work was to replicate Chao’s study and show the potential for variety within what could be a literary genre in its own right.

Methodology

With the aforementioned understanding, I chose /yi/ as my syllable to replicate this linguistic experiment. It is not terribly difficult to make one of these: /yi/ syllables are plentiful, and Chao demonstrated their potential in Aunt Yi. I used Pleco’s search function to find syllables with the term “yi” + the tone number, formed a lextionary, and inspected dictionaries to find and understand ancient meanings (Kroll et al., 2017; Love, 2025).

One challenge I faced with this is that one cannot decide a narrative before writing a one-syllable article; or at least, one must be extremely familiar with the wordstock to conceive a poem. The writer is dealt the cards, and they must write with them. Upon reviewing the lextionary produced, I chose the narrative of an individual killing another, fleeing, and, when seeking therapy for what they did, the psychologist, of the slain’s species, was not very forgiving. One can interpret this, including who is right or wrong, in many ways. What I will say is that this reflects some of my own past mistakes – and many have I made!

Another challenge is ensuring that what is written works within the poetic and grammatical constraints of Classical Chinese (Van Norden, 2019; Fuller, 2024), as well as considering the classical meanings of characters (Zhang and Chen, 2015; Lu, 2016; Kroll et al., 2017). Should this not be done, the work falls apart. I took some inspiration from 賦 Fu poetry as well, which commonly focuses heavily on one or two topics, uses an excessively wide vocabulary, and varies line lengths, aiming to be chanted to encapsulate a situation (Cai, 2007; Cui and Cai, 2012). While I did not focus on a single topic, the wide vocabulary and varied line lengths gave me security in my choices. I would therefore not call this a Fu – it is a one-syllable article through and through. It could perhaps be considered 志怪 Zhiguai literature, with its tall tales and odd premise being reminiscent of Pu Songling (Pu, 2017).

So, what is the result? Let the Hanyu Pinyin speak for itself:

Yī yī yì yì, yì yì, yī yì.

Yī yǐ yì, yǐ; yí, yǐ yì yì.

Yī yì yī yì, yì yì, yì yī.

Yì yī yì,“yī yì yì, yǐ yì!”

Yì yī yí:“Yī! Yì yī yì!”

Yī yǐ yì yì, yì yì, yī yì.

Yī yì yì yì. Yǐ yì yī.

Please download the accompanying PDF file and/or Word document to access Appendix A.

References

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Chao, Y.R. (1968) 語言問題 [Yǔyán wèntí]. 臺灣商務印書館 [Táiwān shāngwù yìn shūguǎn].

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Appendix A: Han Character Annotations

Please download the accompanying PDF file and/or Word document to access Appendix A.

Appendix B: Simplified Chinese Version

For the sake of completeness and accessibility, this is a version of the poem in Simplified Chinese.

《鹥诣医鹢忆·汐洛思》

鹥壹弋鹢，鹢殪，鹥逸。

鹥已唈，偯；疑，倚异意。

鹥诣医鹢，鹢黓，翼黟。

鹢医忆，“鹥异亄，齮肄！”

鹢医咦：“噫！刈鹥翼！”

鹥佁肄译，弋鹢，黟圛。

伊黓鹢殪。

以译鹥。

Copyright Statement

© Llinos Evans. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-ND).