Ten Sing

Ten Sing is a Christian youth program within the YWCA and YMCA, engaging teenagers in creative performing arts.

Activities, goals and values

Ten Sing work is based on a common agreement between member countries of the European Ten Sing Group - The Ten Sing Idea:

Abstract

Ten Sing is an international Youth programme within the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association) and YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association), which focuses on getting young people to express themselves by using their own culture through creative performing arts.

The main aims

The underlying objectives are leadership training, democracy training and personal and social development of body, mind and spirit. Ten Sing invites young people to a creative work process that uses different cultural expressions in a Christian context.

The three C's

The three C's "Culture, Creativity and Christ" are equally important parts of the Ten Sing idea.

By young people, for young people.

Young people know best what young people think, dream of, feel and desire. Therefore, young people should be active in the management of Ten Sing and take responsibility for running programmes themselves.

Pronunciation of English a

There are a variety of pronunciations in modern English and in historical forms of the language for words spelt with the letter ⟨a⟩. Most of these go back to the low vowel (the "short A") of earlier Middle English, which later developed both long and short forms. The sound of the long vowel was altered in the Great Vowel Shift, but later a new long A (or "broad A") developed which was not subject to the shift. These processes have produced the three main pronunciations of ⟨a⟩ in present-day English: those found in the words trap, face and father. Separate developments have produced additional pronunciations in words like square, wash, talk and comma.

Overview

Late Middle English had two phonemes /a/ and /aː/, differing only in length. The /a/ ("short A") was found in words such as cat [kat] and trap [trap], and also before /r/ in words such as start [start]. The /aː/ ("long A") was found in words such as face [faːs], and before /r/ in words such as scare [skaːr]. This long A was generally a result of Middle English open syllable lengthening. For a summary of the various developments in Old and Middle English that led to these vowels, see English historical vowel correspondences.