Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

poetryfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 103 posts

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

#21

Post by cvoss »

larrik wrote: post #2

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

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".)

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

#22

Post by antognini »

WWWWH wrote: post #14

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.

I remember one of my friends in college pointing out before lecture that the professor would always start by saying "OK, So."

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

#23

Post by cvoss »

zahlman wrote: post #7

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

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.

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

#24

Post by pinkmuffinere »

> “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

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

#25

Post by vanderZwan »

WWWWH wrote: post #14

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.

> 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.

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

#26

Post by pcrh »

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] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...

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

#28

Post by zahlman »

cvoss wrote: post #23
zahlman wrote: post #7

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

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.

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.

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

#29

Post by spyrja »

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".)
Post reply on HN