Hpaet

Often times we think of the spoken words in terms of a turn of phrase or great speeches. But these are like comparing photographs to what is really a movie. Language is not a stagnant thing.

I started this current obsession, this current interest, with a simple desire to be able to read Beowulf in its original written form. Beowulf is an epic poem of a hero who fights a monster, Grendel, then the monster's smother, then finally a dragon. It takes place in Scandinavia, but is written in English, Old English. So, I have an old poem with a hero, monsters and dragon, but I might have to learn some new words, right?

Well, it is a little trickier than that. Even though the poem was only written by people in England that spoke in a way that evolved into modern English, it is not recognizable. The first line reads like this, "Hpæt pe Gardena in gear dagum, þeod cyninga, þrym ge frunon, huða æþelingas ellen fremedon!" Old English looks more like German than English, but it is not German either.

So, what is Old English? It is not the language of Shakespeare, that would be Early Modern English. It is not the language of Chaucer's Canterbury tales, that would be Middle English. This is older than all of that, the language of the Anglo Saxons, who occupied what is now England. Their language was a fusion of Latin, two dialects of Norse and a bit of Celtic. It wasn't a static entity, either though, it change and evolved over 700 years, the final major change coming in 1066 with the Norman conquest of England.

If you look of that Old English word Hpæt you will find a few things. First, you will find that it is an alternate spelling of the word Hwaet (rhymes with cat). Second, you will find that translators commonly translate this word to Listen. If you dig a little deeper, though, you will see it is more closely aligned with the word "what", a question meant to draw attention. Do you see the string now? The hint of how we got from there to here?

Hpæt is an alternate spelling of the word pronounced Hwaet. This word is the Anglo Saxon version of the Proto-Germanic khwat, the old Saxon what or the Danish hvad. This word, by 1300 was recorded as what, like we see it today. No alternate spelling, reversing the first two letters.

It is hard to explain why I love this, but there is something like ancestry and mystery in this search. It makes every word we speak not just the word itself, but carrying the blood of all the words that precede it. It speaks to the ideas of mutation and evolution in the things we say, but also of how words carry from one culture to another. It makes me wonder if all language draws back to just a handful of Proto-languages, if the variations are predictable, if you could read dozens of languages just by knowing their progenitor, if you could show cultures interacted with each other by word sharing. It feels to me like a puzzle which has been before my eyes my whole life, but I didn't know. I had been admiring the snapshots, but had no idea there was a movie behind each one.