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Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#42It'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".)
See also "latterly".
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#43I 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 w…
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.
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.
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#44(2013)
(circa 1000)
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#45Related: Rumi’s Mesnevî also opens with “bishnav”, “listen” in Persian.
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#46Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything
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?
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#47Does it matter? Genuine question-- does this (mis)translation change anything
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.
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why would you assume the original had an exclamation mark? Indeed the whole symbol was not invented until the 1300s.
The article puts punctuation into its rendering of the original text. That confused me too.
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#49I 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 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).
Re: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)
#50I 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.
That's great. Similar trick I've picked up is to say "blah blah blah ... is as follows:" followed by a pause and then your explanation, which is always more than the one or two words the listener might have otherwise been expecting. This technique allows you to keep the talking stick and express an idea that takes more than a few words, without someone jumping to an immediate conclusion or interrupting you.