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

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

#51

Post by andrewflnr »

ubertaco wrote: post #49
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 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 ty…

> He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road"

Optimal play from the professor.

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

#52

Post by nonethewiser »

mklyachman wrote: post #32

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

>According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!” should instead be understood as: “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

So semantically... no difference.

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

#53

Post by rmunn »

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.

On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world."

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).

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

#54

Post by thaumasiotes »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #4

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.

> 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.

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

#55

Post by thaumasiotes »

spyrja wrote: post #47
mklyachman wrote: post #32

Does 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 s…

> 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.

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

#56

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
tracerbulletx wrote: post #4

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.

> 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.

May I suggest Old Frisian (& Old Saxon) as well

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)

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

#57

Post by bccdee »

spyrja wrote: post #29

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 w…

Yeah—I'm reminded of the opening sentence of Slaughterhouse Five, which goes, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Kurt Vonnegut isn't worried that you're not listening; he's trying to create a sense of intimacy and emphasis, as one who is taking you aside to tell you something crucially important which he fears you may dismiss out of hand.

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.

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

#58

Post by stavros »

rmunn wrote: post #53
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.

On the first day of class in undergrad, most professors are handing out the syllabus and talking about class requirements and basically doing zero lecturing. Not my Philosophy 101 prof. The minute the class was scheduled to start, he opened the door and walked into the room saying, "The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world." I don't remember the rest of the lecture…

Unfortunately, cataloguing all the knowledge in the world created new knowledge, leading to a sort of Zeno's paradox of cataloguing.

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

#59

Post by tsimionescu »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #48
Sharlin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll note that it's not this decision is not coming from the newspaper article's writer, it's coming from any common transliteration of the manuscript that you'll find. But it's clearly a transliteration decision made because the people doing this assume it is an interjection, and they're using modern punctuation rules accordingly.

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

#60

Post by antonvs »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #4

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.

The paper (someone else linked it) makes a pretty strong argument with quite a bit of evidence.

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.

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