H, I, J, K, L, M, N

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I've got other stuff to write about, which I probably won't get to soon because I'm incredibly busy, but this just has to get written right now.

This week I was teaching a lesson on rhymes. All native English speakers do rhymes endlessly as children, but my students, despite being English majors, haven't spent much time on them. Every Mandarin syllable (each character is one syllable) ends in either a vowel, an n, or an ng (or occasionally an r). And in Mandarin, there are just over 400 possible syllables, whereas in English there are thousands upon thousands. So there's a lot more opportunities for rhymes in English.

So I prepared a lesson that looked examples of rhymes that are spelled alike (cat/hat/rat), rhymes that are spelled differently (stuff/tough, great/eight), and alike spellings that don't rhyme (tough/though/through, great/seat). We also listened to and looked at some song lyrics ("I Want to Hold Your Hand" for my freshmen, "Moondance" for my sophomores) and classic nursery rhymes for different rhyme structures (within or at the end of the line, AABB or ABAB, etc. ... oh damn, I just realized I completely left out limericks!) and different types of rhymes.

By different types of rhymes, I mean: vowel-only rhymes, in which the vowel sound is the same but the final consonant is different ("Oh PLEASE say to ME, and let me be your MAN / And PLEASE say to ME, you'll let me hold your HAND"); what I call "true" rhymes, in which it's the last vowel plus all subsequent sounds (what we usually think of: moondance/romance, hush/blush); and "complex" rhymes, meaning more than one syllable (calling/falling; touch you/much you).

And I also explained how the meter of the song can clue you in on which words rhyme. In "Mary Had a Little Lamb," the rhymes fall on the fourth beat. In "One, two, buckle my shoe...", they fall on the second and fourth beats (what I called "internal" rhymes). I realized that the alphabet song has an example of second-beat letters rhyming in a vowel-only rhyme, so I included it in the lesson:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G
H, I, J, K, L-M-N-O, P
Q, R, S ... T, U, V
W, X ... Y and Z

And that's when my students told me that they learned a different alphabet song. It goes like this, to the exact same tune (I urge you to try singing it in your head, or better yet, imagine a room full of 30+ 19-year-old Chinese students singing it to you):

A, B, C, D, E, F, G
H, I, J, K, L, M, N
O, P, Q ... R, S, T
U, V, W ... X, Y, Z
X, Y, Z, now you see
I can sing my A-B-C's

I was stunned speechless. Their version's second line does not rhyme. And they had never heard my version of the A-B-C's.

I've now had eight opportunities to try to convey to my classes how absolutely positively bizarre their version sounds to me. The key points are first, that this is a song we sing hundreds if not thousands of times during our most formative years, so any alteration will be particularly jarring to us, but second and most pertinently, the second line doesn't rhyme!! By my sixth class I was juxtaposing my rhyming version with their L-M-N version, and doing so in fact elicited laughs from them when they became aware of the lack-of-rhyme dissonance.

I actually had an debate with the British friends I made in Shanghai about their pronunciation of the letter Z as "zed" rather than "zee," in which I contended that it should be "zee" because then the alphabet song doesn't rhyme. Incredibly, not only was this a game-set-match argument, but their reaction was like they'd just realized for the first time that their alphabet song rhymed all the way until the very last word broke the pattern. Am I the only lunatic who notices rhymes???

Anyway, that's my post. The Chinese version of the English alphabet song goes, "H, I, J, K, L, M, N," completely breaking from the rhyme. I am now incredibly curious about why. Is it something about rhymes, or the lack thereof, in Chinese? When, and from whom, was the L-M-N version instated in China? Does it exist anywhere else? People knowledgeable about Chinese, please post a comment!

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