Next Time Won’t You Not Desecrate the Classics

Why can’t people just leave the classics alone? Today in class, we sang the alphabet song. You know, “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman”, the one that shares the same melody as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”, and probably dozens of other children’s songs. We all know it as something pretty close to the following:

A-B-C-D-E-F-Gee (rest)
H-I-J-K-LMNOPee (rest)
Q-R-esS (eh sound) (rest)
T-U-Vee (rest)
W-eX (eh sound) (rest)
Y and Zee. (rest)

Now I know my ABCs. (rest)
Next time, won’t you sing/play with me? (end)

The Canadian version is the same, except for the ending:

…
Y and Zed (rest)

Now I know my As to Zeds-- (rest)
Let’s all go and wet our beds. (wet bed)

Crazy Canucks aside, we can all pretty much agree on the structure of the song. Well, apparently not all of us. Whoever put this horrific Eigo Nooto (English Notebook) program together 1) doesn’t speak English natively and 2) decided that it was too hard for the kids in Japan to learn how to say “LMNOPee.” So, here’s the new version of the song:

A-B-C-D-E-F-Gee (rest)
H-I-J-K-L-M-eN (rest)
O-P-Q-R-S-T-yU (rest)
V-W and X-Y-Zee (rest)

Happy, happy. I’m ha-PPY. (rest)
I can sing my ABC. (shoot self)

Since there’s almost no communication between team-teachers about lessons, I was ill-prepared for this travesty come class time. The teacher hit “play” on the CD player and asked me to direct the singing. I loathingly shook my head when the vocalist strayed from the normal, accepted, canonized version of the ABC song. It's one thing to change a word or two, but another to change the entire structure of a song.

But let’s look at the real problem behind this version of the song: it sucks. No attempt whatsoever was made to preserve the meter of the original. The final sounds of stanzas are nowhere close to being related. And the virtual/hermaphrodite/wrenched stress/weakened/anisobaric rhyme of ha-PPY would have been bad enough if it wasn’t paired with the ungrammatical, highly Japanese-sounding “I can sing my ABC.”

I made a point of enunciating the nonexistent “s” each of the twelve times I was forced to sing this disgraceful rubbish, but I don’t know if they noticed. The lyrics are written (just as sung) in the textbooks. When a teacher asked me for clarification on the pronunciation of this horrible song, I did my best to explain that this was not the normal version.

What will happen when these Japanese kids sing their “ABC” out in the English-speaking real world? Oh, the ignominy! The shame! The Ministry of Education is sending these poor children on a collision course with awkward embarrassment. I know it’s a difficult task, but I will voluntarily bear the massive burden of cleansing their English. Hey, somebody’s got to do it.