Pecha Kucha

This is my first foray into the world of Pecha Kucha, from the 2011 KOTESOL National Conference, held in Daejeon. For those of you who don't know, Pecha Kucha is a kind of antithesis to boring Power Point presentations. PPTs have really just replaced OHPs and the Pecha Kucha is a way to spice things up. Invented in Japan by some engineers, it's 20 slides, 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds - keeping presentations, brief, concise, and maintaining audience interest high.

I chose to speak about the History of the English Language. If the 6:40 weren't constraining enough, I decided to do it in verse. I felt rather constrained by PPT itself, so just to make it more of a challenge, I decided to use Prezi instead. It too had its limits, specifically when animating a given "transition" in prezi. Anyway, below is the verse,
and the link to my prezi is here. Go into the slide presentation, using edit (icon on right side), then at the bottom right, then click SHOW at the top left, then HOLD CLICK the right arrow, select 20 second interval, and voilà ! You have Pecha Kucha mode. At this point, you will have printed this blog page, and will be reading along with my poem in front of you, no doubt ;P Enjoy...

History of the English Language

You say tomato and I say tomato
A difference in pronunciation

That has often distinguished friend from foe;
George Bernard Shaw once said that England and America

Are 2 countries separated by a common language.
But it wasn’t always so.

***********1***********

Permit a fool to tell a tale of
Happiness, triumph, resilience and sorrow,

For today I stand before you
To unravel the mystery of our language’s history.

440 AD, in England!
Was the place to be!

***********2***********
T’was whence our story began
(Though Britain has been around since the dawn of man).

We begin with the Foederati
A group of Germanic goons, often mercenary
Who one should NEVER invite to a garden party.

You see, like many a tribal chief,
The Roman Governor needed help with the neighboring thief.
So he hired the Foederati for some relief.
***********3***********

Then the governor stopped paying, which they considered a slight.
In droves, they came by boat day and night.
Angles, Jutes, Frisians, Franks, and Saxons alike

They purged the Picts and Celts and everyone else from this strange rock;
With the natives gone, all but 12 words were forgot.
***********4***********

The first writing in Old English was made
Beowulf- you may have heard of it-
A tale of 3 monsters versus our hero on a tirade.

Well the Danes kept coming, season after season
A treaty was sought, a yearning for peace its reason.

This great compromise the king oversaw
Thus the name Alfred the GREAT- for creating the Danelaw.
***********5***********

Over those years of Danish invading and pummeling
Early English endured, thanks to the King

By way of an oracle through writing
Called The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

During those interceding days then
How was it that Rap- a Norse Chap
Communicated with Edith - a Sexy Saxon Vixen
His newly betrothen?
***********6***********




With Norse words like Hroset
Being similar to Old English’s the HOORSE –
Can you guess what they were talking about? A horse of course!,

Simple compromises in grammar
Helped avert marriages ending in disaster.

With such simplifications for plurals given,
We have books and horses
Not baetch and hrosen.
***********7***********

If you remember nothing else from this
Pecha Kucha, let it be this: the year 1066

Between England and Normandy
A dynastic spat for the throne
A battle between blood, paid for in bone

William of Normandy a victory he did obtain
In Hastings, Killing King Harold
With an arrow through the eye, into his brain
***********8***********

These ‘invaders’ ruled England
For what amounts to a century times four

Now, contrary to what you may have heard
Our language was NOT starved or made poor

In fact it blossomed and thrived
English was the language of the people
In spite of what was spoken at the steeple.
***********9***********

As much as one may resent the French
It is they we must thank

For it was their language
That filled our lexical tank

Beef for cow
Mutton for sheep
Tailor, barber, oh the list goes on

Like pork for pig,
Ironically though,
the French now say cauchon
(heun heun heun heun)

We added layers of meaning
Like hatchet for small ax
And demand for a strong form of ask
***********10***********

Eventually though English did prevail
In part because the Norman kingdom was frail
With all the crusades and foreign wars
King John’s world apart it tore

Though most may remember him
From the story of Robin Hood
As Richard the Lionheart’s evil brotha
It was John who give us the Magna Carta
***********11***********





By now English literature was starting to prosper
Thanks in no small part to a man named Geoffrey Chaucer

Many languages could Chaucer read, write and speak
Latin, German, English French and even Greek
But in English he chose to write
In the language of the commoner
He wrote about love and not out of spite
***********12***********

Whan that Aprille with its shores soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich liquor
Of which vertu engendred is the floor
***********13***********

Boy didn’t that sound pretty sweet, but strange?
That’s because just after Chaucer
Our vowel began a big change

We call in the Great Vowel Shift
Nobody knows why it happened
But my guess is to avoid the plague
Many people had to wander and drift.
***********14***********

If the GVS weren’t exciting enough
William Caxton with England’s first printing press
Had it pretty rough
Finding consistent spelling was pretty tough

So the printers in London came up with a plan
They standardized spelling
To make things easier on the ink man.
***********15***********
It wasn’t the scholars of Oxford or Cambridge
In their ivory tower
That controlled the way words were spelled
Oh No! It was the printers in London
Now, with all the power.

Even with spelling quirks solved
And vowel changes made
There was more in store
For the English language, I’m afraid.
If there is one man you loathe
When it comes to English
***********16***********

It ought to be Robert Lowth
It was his idea
That we never end a sentence in a preposition
Now what would I do that for?

The thought of his book,
A Short Introduction to English Grammar
Still makes me st sta stammer!
***********17***********

Enough of the past
Who cares about the bard,
What about this century?

Well our language is still changing,
Just ask Hillary
For there is no one more famous for switching vowels
Than she
***********18***********



Madame Secretary,
Knowing what you know about Bill Clinton
Would you have relations with that man?
(We need to analyse the risk)

Please, answer the question- yes or no
Would you have sexual relations with that man?
(certainly not)
***********19***********

If you’re still wondering
Why is it goose and geese?
This presention is only 400 seconds long
So cut me a break please

Really though,
The word goose was introduced
After all the changes were made
So the rules are pretty fast and loose
For artistic license reasons
Some tiny details did I bend
But if you truly enjoyed my Pecha Kucha
Please, tell a friend.