7 ms·

Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)

larrik 9mo ago
It's an interesting idea, but I'm thrown by "a count" in "should be taken into a count by future translations"
- Jtsummers 9mo ago
  Not present in the original report at The Independent: > “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/news/listen-beowulf-opening-line-misinterpreted-for-200-years-8921027.html 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 9mo ago
  Amusingly, the source article [0] linked to in TFA does not contain the same error: > “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said. 0: https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/listen-beowulf-opening-line-misinterpreted-for-200-years-8921027.html https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...
  - pc86 9mo ago
    Is this the Beowulf translation field equivalent of incorrectly correcting someone's correct use of the their/there/they're homophones?
    - steve1977 9mo ago
      They should of considered that! /s
- steve1977 9mo ago
  Me too, I just thought that I wouldn't trust an article on linguistics with such an error too much.
- cvoss 9mo ago
  Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)
  - selimthegrim 9mo ago
    See also "latterly".
tracerbulletx 9mo ago
Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- cvoss 9mo ago
  The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago
  > There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be. 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.
  - gsf_emergency_6 9mo ago
    May I suggest Old Frisian (& Old Saxon) as well https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111 https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111 Video from this week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs&t=12m57s 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#:~:text=SBie%20%40rofee%C2%A7%20l%5E%C3%B6ren%20h)ir%20%C3%BCon%20ben%20%C2%A9ccrb%C3%A4nen https://archive.org/details/beowulfdasltest00beowgoog#:~:tex... (Karl Simrock, 1859)
  - antonvs 9mo ago
gadders 9mo ago
You could always read the Maria Dahvana Headley translation that starts with "Bro!": https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro 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."
- spchampion2 9mo ago
  I know it's unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that translation. It felt so alive, and other translations have never engaged me in quite the same way.
  - gadders 9mo ago
    It was the only version I managed to finish, unless you count "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton (which is loosely based on it and mashed up with the story of Ahmad ibn Fadlan). 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.
- Eric_WVGG 9mo ago
  beat me to it. another article: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the-beowulf-you-think-you-know https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the... her adaptation, The Mere Wife, needs to get adapted to film or series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife
zahlman 9mo ago
How about "Whoa!"? That seems to me like it preserves some of the ambiguous sense (calling for attention vs. remarking upon a discovery).
- cvoss 9mo ago
  The issue is really focused on the grammatical function of the word. The researcher is arguing that it's not ever used as an interjection, which "whoa" always is.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    I would say the presence of an exclamation mark, in a context where exclamation marks are rare, is strong evidence of use as an interjection. Unless we're arguing that some other mark was mistaken for an exclamation, generally I would say rare typography is "marked" (noteworthy) rather than being likely mistaken. I think the researcher's position is not likely to hold much sway going forward.
    - tsimionescu 9mo ago
      The exclamation mark is added in transliterations of the manuscript because it is believed to be an interjection. If you look at the manuscript, there is no such mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Co...
    - Sharlin 9mo ago
      Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.
      - LudwigNagasena 9mo ago
        The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.
jsksdkldld 9mo ago
[dead]
slwvx 9mo ago
"What ho" as in British English seems like a descendant of this usage https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of-bertie-wooster https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...
- Rebelgecko 9mo ago
  There was a more colloquial translation a few years ago that rendered it as "Bro!"
  - chuho 9mo ago
    That's the 2021 translation by Maria Headley https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtranslation/ https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtran...
  - onraglanroad 9mo ago
    I guess "What bro!" is less sexist than "What ho!"
  - WorldMaker 9mo ago
    I feel like Lil Jon would remind us that "What?!" still works pretty well today.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
roywiggins 9mo ago
(2013)
- IAmBroom 9mo ago
  (circa 1000)
WWWWH 9mo ago
I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention. *SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry… Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
- antognini 9mo ago
  I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."
  - ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
    I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.
- vanderZwan 9mo ago
  > SO let me tell you all about how... Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.
- ubertaco 9mo ago
  I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..." 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).
IanCal 9mo ago
I’ll share another great version of Beowulf- Bea Wolf. Based on kids, with fantastic artwork and a great story/version. My kids absolutely love me reading this and I absolutely love reading it as a large passed down story of battles. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf
- wvbdmp 9mo ago
  Cool, that was enough to intrigue me, but for those on the fence perhaps it’ll help to note that the author is none other than Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame. Regarding the topic, this graphic novel begins “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives…”
- wduquette 9mo ago
  It's a whole lot of fun.
pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into a count by future translations,” he said. 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
pcrh 9mo ago
It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0]. 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/413d588b-aeec-4aa2-8771-8530c8653c46/content https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...
jccc 9mo ago
> and more recently “So!” by Seamus Heaney in 2000. This is despite the research suggesting that the Anglo Saxons made little use of the exclamation mark Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation. His version begins: “So.”
spyrja 9mo ago
I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)
- mc32 9mo ago
  People are saying that the interjection interpretation is influenced by its use as interjection in Shakespeare’s time. By that time what/hwæt was being used differently than the way it was when Beowulf was authored hundreds of years before.
  - spyrja 9mo ago
    Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.
    - vintermann 9mo ago
      Those aren't interjections in other Germanic languages, they're called modal particles. Norwegian: "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")
mklyachman 9mo ago
Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything
- IAmBroom 9mo ago
  Do you know the joke about the priest who died, and discovered God meant priests to "celebrate", not "celibate"? 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?
- spyrja 9mo ago
  Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
  - thaumasiotes 9mo ago
    > that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse. What's up with the phrasing? Old English isn't a language that developed from Old Norse.
    - spyrja 9mo ago
      When the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived in England around fall of Rome in the early 400s, the "official" language was Latin (as Britain had been a Roman colony since 43 AD) whereas locals spoke various Celtic dialects. The newcomers brought with them Scandinavian tongues and for the next 500 years or so Old English developed with minor changes (with sparse inclusions from Latin and Celtic influences). That all changed in 1066 with the Norman Invasion where Old Northern French became the new official language. (French also began as a Nordic language, but over time only a few hundred or so words remained, with the rest being mostly Latin-based.) As far as Modern English is concerned, while only ~20% is based on Old Norse, those words form more than 80% of what is most commonly used on a day-to-day basis.
dizzy9 9mo ago
Graham Scheper has a recent video on this topic. He also believes that "Hwaet" is not an interjection, but more like Red Riding Hood's "What big eyes you have!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  You seem to have linked the wrong video (yours is about the meaning of the name Beowolf), the right link about Hwaet is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs
  - ralferoo 9mo ago
    I watched this video a few days ago after it was randomly recommended by YouTube. Definitely found it very interesting and he has a load of other videos about learning Old English, so I'll be checking out more of them soon.
  - n4r9 9mo ago
    Is it just me or does this video look AI-generated?
plasticeagle 9mo ago
I love the phrase "Subtly wide of the mark."
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Jun8 9mo ago
Related: Rumi’s Mesnevî also opens with “bishnav”, “listen” in Persian.
dghf 9mo ago
> Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!” The P.G. Wodehouse translation?
- Synaesthesia 9mo ago
  LMAO
the_gipsy 9mo ago
Sound just like "That: [situation or summary]" style. Interchangeable that and what.
nephihaha 9mo ago
Graham Scheper had a good video on this recently. About a quarter of an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs 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".

It's an interesting idea, but I'm thrown by "a count" in "should be taken into a count by future translations"

Jtsummers 9mo ago
Not present in the original report at The Independent: > “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/news/listen-beowulf-opening-line-misinterpreted-for-200-years-8921027.html 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 9mo ago
Amusingly, the source article [0] linked to in TFA does not contain the same error: > “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into account by future translations,” he said. 0: https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/listen-beowulf-opening-line-misinterpreted-for-200-years-8921027.html https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/new...
- pc86 9mo ago
  Is this the Beowulf translation field equivalent of incorrectly correcting someone's correct use of the their/there/they're homophones?
  - steve1977 9mo ago
    They should of considered that! /s
steve1977 9mo ago
Me too, I just thought that I wouldn't trust an article on linguistics with such an error too much.
cvoss 9mo ago
Yeah, weird to see a couple of linguistic mistakes like this in an article about linguistic mistakes. Another is the misuse of "latter-day". The article uses it to refer to an old thing that is analogous to a modern thing: "[a] latter-day 'yo!'" But "latter-day" actually describes something modern. (E.g., the "latter days" refers to the present age. See "Latter-day Saints".)
- selimthegrim 9mo ago
  See also "latterly".

Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
cvoss 9mo ago
The article references a forthcoming publication that I can't find a draft of. Here's an older publication on the topic by the same author: http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf Edit: Oh, the PF article is from 2013, so this must be the actual publication after all.
thaumasiotes 9mo ago
> There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be. 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.
- gsf_emergency_6 9mo ago
  May I suggest Old Frisian (& Old Saxon) as well https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111 https://xcancel.com/thijsporck/status/1395838213198127111 Video from this week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs&t=12m57s 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#:~:text=SBie%20%40rofee%C2%A7%20l%5E%C3%B6ren%20h)ir%20%C3%BCon%20ben%20%C2%A9ccrb%C3%A4nen https://archive.org/details/beowulfdasltest00beowgoog#:~:tex... (Karl Simrock, 1859)
- antonvs 9mo ago

gadders 9mo ago

You could always read the Maria Dahvana Headley translation that starts with "Bro!": https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro 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."

spchampion2 9mo ago
I know it's unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that translation. It felt so alive, and other translations have never engaged me in quite the same way.
- gadders 9mo ago
  It was the only version I managed to finish, unless you count "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Crichton (which is loosely based on it and mashed up with the story of Ahmad ibn Fadlan). 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.
Eric_WVGG 9mo ago
beat me to it. another article: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the-beowulf-you-think-you-know https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906423831/bro-this-is-not-the... her adaptation, The Mere Wife, needs to get adapted to film or series yesterday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mere_Wife

zahlman 9mo ago

How about "Whoa!"? That seems to me like it preserves some of the ambiguous sense (calling for attention vs. remarking upon a discovery).

cvoss 9mo ago
The issue is really focused on the grammatical function of the word. The researcher is arguing that it's not ever used as an interjection, which "whoa" always is.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  I would say the presence of an exclamation mark, in a context where exclamation marks are rare, is strong evidence of use as an interjection. Unless we're arguing that some other mark was mistaken for an exclamation, generally I would say rare typography is "marked" (noteworthy) rather than being likely mistaken. I think the researcher's position is not likely to hold much sway going forward.
  - tsimionescu 9mo ago
    The exclamation mark is added in transliterations of the manuscript because it is believed to be an interjection. If you look at the manuscript, there is no such mark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV_f._132r.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#/media/File:Beowulf_Co...
  - Sharlin 9mo ago
    Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.
    - LudwigNagasena 9mo ago
      The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.

jsksdkldld 9mo ago

[dead]

slwvx 9mo ago

"What ho" as in British English seems like a descendant of this usage https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of-bertie-wooster https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77151/what-ho-of...

Rebelgecko 9mo ago
There was a more colloquial translation a few years ago that rendered it as "Bro!"
- chuho 9mo ago
  That's the 2021 translation by Maria Headley https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtranslation/ https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374110031/beowulfanewtran...
- onraglanroad 9mo ago
  I guess "What bro!" is less sexist than "What ho!"
- WorldMaker 9mo ago
  I feel like Lil Jon would remind us that "What?!" still works pretty well today.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

roywiggins 9mo ago

(2013)

IAmBroom 9mo ago
(circa 1000)

WWWWH 9mo ago

I used to use this (still do really) as a technique when starting undergraduate lectures. They’re there, ready to listen, but chatting away and need a moment to focus their attention. *SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry… Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.

antognini 9mo ago
I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
  I have had to train myself out of doing that when recording videos. The best I've managed is that I can do it sometimes, and most of the rest of the time I leave a long enough pause after that I can cleanly edit it off.
vanderZwan 9mo ago
> SO let me tell you all about how... Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.
ubertaco 9mo ago
I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..." 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).

IanCal 9mo ago

I’ll share another great version of Beowulf- Bea Wolf. Based on kids, with fantastic artwork and a great story/version. My kids absolutely love me reading this and I absolutely love reading it as a large passed down story of battles. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf

wvbdmp 9mo ago
Cool, that was enough to intrigue me, but for those on the fence perhaps it’ll help to note that the author is none other than Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame. Regarding the topic, this graphic novel begins “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives…”
wduquette 9mo ago
It's a whole lot of fun.

pinkmuffinere 9mo ago

> “I’d like to say that the interpretation I have put forward should be taken into a count by future translations,” he said. 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

pcrh 9mo ago

It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0]. 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/413d588b-aeec-4aa2-8771-8530c8653c46/content https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...

jccc 9mo ago

> and more recently “So!” by Seamus Heaney in 2000. This is despite the research suggesting that the Anglo Saxons made little use of the exclamation mark Seamus Heaney does not use an exclamation. His version begins: “So.”

spyrja 9mo ago

I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)

mc32 9mo ago
People are saying that the interjection interpretation is influenced by its use as interjection in Shakespeare’s time. By that time what/hwæt was being used differently than the way it was when Beowulf was authored hundreds of years before.
- spyrja 9mo ago
  Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.
  - vintermann 9mo ago
    Those aren't interjections in other Germanic languages, they're called modal particles. Norwegian: "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")

mklyachman 9mo ago

Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything

IAmBroom 9mo ago
Do you know the joke about the priest who died, and discovered God meant priests to "celebrate", not "celibate"? 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?
spyrja 9mo ago
Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago
  > that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse. What's up with the phrasing? Old English isn't a language that developed from Old Norse.
  - spyrja 9mo ago
    When the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived in England around fall of Rome in the early 400s, the "official" language was Latin (as Britain had been a Roman colony since 43 AD) whereas locals spoke various Celtic dialects. The newcomers brought with them Scandinavian tongues and for the next 500 years or so Old English developed with minor changes (with sparse inclusions from Latin and Celtic influences). That all changed in 1066 with the Norman Invasion where Old Northern French became the new official language. (French also began as a Nordic language, but over time only a few hundred or so words remained, with the rest being mostly Latin-based.) As far as Modern English is concerned, while only ~20% is based on Old Norse, those words form more than 80% of what is most commonly used on a day-to-day basis.

dizzy9 9mo ago

Graham Scheper has a recent video on this topic. He also believes that "Hwaet" is not an interjection, but more like Red Riding Hood's "What big eyes you have!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gZKCPk40WI

tsimionescu 9mo ago
You seem to have linked the wrong video (yours is about the meaning of the name Beowolf), the right link about Hwaet is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs
- ralferoo 9mo ago
  I watched this video a few days ago after it was randomly recommended by YouTube. Definitely found it very interesting and he has a load of other videos about learning Old English, so I'll be checking out more of them soon.
- n4r9 9mo ago
  Is it just me or does this video look AI-generated?

plasticeagle 9mo ago

I love the phrase "Subtly wide of the mark."

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Jun8 9mo ago

Related: Rumi’s Mesnevî also opens with “bishnav”, “listen” in Persian.

dghf 9mo ago

> Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!” The P.G. Wodehouse translation?

Synaesthesia 9mo ago
LMAO

the_gipsy 9mo ago

Sound just like "That: [situation or summary]" style. Interchangeable that and what.

nephihaha 9mo ago

Graham Scheper had a good video on this recently. About a quarter of an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIfHNn9KGs 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".