Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.
The only real way to make the case compelling would be to discover new Old English texts. So there is enough information; the case is not going to be compelling.
https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111
Video from this week
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs&t=12m57s
Addresses Shakespeare's objection
Commenters there point to German translations that open with "Wie.."
https://archive.org/details/beowulfdasltest00beowgoog#:~:tex...
(Karl Simrock, 1859)
The fact that earlier translators had to break up the original sentence and insert an exclamation point after "What" is already a bit suspect. Walkden's interpretation actually makes more sense, when you see examples like "Hwæt stendst þu her wælhreowa deor?", meaning "Why are you standing here, cruel beast?"
This may be a case where early translators over-indexed on e.g. Latin patterns and made a mistake which was then just accepted by subsequent translators.
It does seem quite likely that the translation that begins "What!" (with the exclamation mark being inserted by translators) was just an error by early translators who were over-indexing on Latin grammatical patterns which weren't at all common in Old English.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro
"Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!
In the old days, everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound.
Only stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times."
I think it's a good compromise between staying true-ish to the language, and also making it come alive as an epic adventure story.
her adaptation, The Mere Wife, needs to get adapted to film or series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife
I think that's what I missed.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtran...
*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
all about how...
Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.
It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.
I remember one session in particular.
This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.
This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."
The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.
"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.
He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
Optimal play from the professor.
I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:
1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.
2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.
3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.
(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).
As for fragmented texts, at the time when the Greek philosophers were alive there were a lot more texts available to them than we now have. A lot was lost over the years, including when the library at Alexandria burned (48 BC, I believe). We know they had access to many texts we don't because they quote from them, referencing material that we no longer have access to.
But this is a side issue. The main point of my comment was how the prof managed to communicate two or three things at once by the simple action of walking into the classroom, already lecturing, precisely at the scheduled start of the class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria?wprov=sf...
> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.
Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)
This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".
I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.
Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.
Regarding the topic, this graphic novel begins “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives…”
I think there’s a bit of unintentional humor in this line, like it belongs in “i am the walrus”. The researcher would _like_ to say something, which makes me think the sentence has an implied completion of “but I won’t say it”, which I already find kind of funny. And then of course the quote is tagged with “he said”, lol, almost like the author is mocking him. Idk, that’s so funny to me
The abstract reads:
>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.
[0] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...
Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation.
His version begins:
“So.”
"Det er sant." That is true. "Det er vel sant." That's true, I suppose (resigned). "Det er nok sant." That's true, I suppose (serious). "Det er da sant." That's true, come on.
German also has them, though I'm not confident enough to explain the fine difference between "Das ist wahr" and "Das ist noch war".
English maybe has some remnants of them, but they're rare and probably a bit more archaic. You can say "That is yet true", and the "yet" there doesn't necessarily imply that you think it might not be true in the future. You probably understand what I mean if I say "That is but true" but it sounds very archaic. Usually you have to invoke a full adverb to signify mode in English ("That's actually true")
It seems intuitive to me that the "hwaet" functioned more as a literary device than as a simple call for attention. It is, after all, a poem.
It matters to those who care about this piece of literature. Maybe not as much as a lifetime of coital bliss missed, but who's to say?
What's up with the phrasing? Old English isn't a language that developed from Old Norse.
Beowulf was written in Old English, which is not a Nordic language.
> ... any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
Similarly, Old English didn't develop from Old Norse.
There may be a Celtic influence upon it as well, as with some of the Icelandic sagas, but you would have to dig much deeper for that.
Old Norse was a North Germanic language. Old English was a West Germanic language. They were mutually intelligible to a significant degree, since both were Germanic languages that evolved from the hypothetical common ancestor Proto-Germanic, but saying Old English was "90% a Nordic language" is like saying that humans are 90% chimpanzees. Both evolved from a common ancestor, one did not evolve from the other.
As for modern English, there are numerous Celtic loanwords and calques in American, Canadian and Australian slang and dialect.
But it doesn't make sense to say "such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale" without some sort of explanation for the focus on "Nordic" languages. Subsequent comments have made it clear that the commenter is under the mistaken impression that Old English was a Nordic language. It was not.
So semantically... no difference.
The P.G. Wodehouse translation?
There are some other videos on Tolkien's translation. He didn't like the phrase "whaleroad" used in some versions because he thought it sounded too like "railroad".
larrik•2w ago
Jtsummers•2w ago
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...
It's possible The Independent fixed it up in an edit after The Poetry Foundation made a copy of it.
jihadjihad•2w ago
pc86•2w ago
steve1977•2w ago
steve1977•2w ago
cvoss•2w ago
selimthegrim•2w ago