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Telling Stories A problem-solving approach to learning about language Telling Stories 1 Person Activity Hundreds of years ago, speakers of English spoke differently from speakers of present-day English. Can you work out what some of these differences are, based on the information that you can see below? In the first column, there is a list of sentences written in present-day English. In the second column, the sentences are written in Early Modern English (spoken from about 1500 to about 1700). Some of the sentences are the same, some are different. Can you match up the Early Modern English sentence with its present-day partner? HINT: In present-day English we use ‘you’ when we are talking to just one person, or when we are talking to more than one person, but speakers of other languages make a difference between addressing just one person [which we can call ‘you (singular)’] and more than one [‘you (plural)’]. In many European languages, the word for ‘you (singular)’ begins with a tor a d- (e.g. tu in French, du in German). Column 1 Column 2 I love he loveth you (singular) love thou lovest he loves I sing I sing I love you (singular) sing she hath she sing thou singest I have thou hast you (singular) have I have she has she singeth Telling Stories 2 Discussion You have just learned about a bit of grammar called PERSON. Person is the term we use to talk about different participants in an event, such as the speaker, the person spoken to, and others. We make a distinction between the first person (the speaker), the second person (the addressee), and the third person (others). We can see person differences in the singular pronouns (I = first person; you = second person; he, she and it = third person) in contemporary English. In earlier English, speakers could use thou to refer to just one addressee. The different endings on the verbs also relate to person: for example, the verb ended in –st if the subject was second person singular (e.g. thou lovest/singest/hast). Link to narrative Stories can be presented from different points of view. A first-person point of view is one where the narrator is a character who presents the events from their perspective; first-person narrators refer to themselves as I or we. A second-person point of view often involves the reader being addressed (as you), as if the reader is a character in the story. A third-person point of view has the characters referred to as he, she or it. The narrator often seems like an observer, rather than a character in the story. Here is the start of The Diary of a Killer Cat. Do you think this involves a first-, second- or third-person point of view? How do you know? Okay, okay. So hang me. I killed the bird. I’m a cat. It’s practically my job to go creeping round the garden after little eensy-weensy birdy-pies that can hardly fly from one hedge to the other. What do you think the effect of writing from this point of view is? For example, do you think it’s funny to present the events of the story from this point of view? Why? Telling Stories 3