How about hwæt? Or as Seamus Heaney translates it, so.
Since no one is telling you: it’s the red squiggly underscore that most spell checking software uses to tell you it thinks something is misspelled.
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I usually hear hwaet translated as listen, but that’s in dispute these days.
I’m certainly not an expert on the issue (although I had already read the Independent article you linked to and a couple of others), but so seems to be much less of an exclamation than listen in the Irish dialect, and it works without a separate exclamation mark. I like how he reads it in this version, in any case.
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One thing that I’m surprised I rarely see mentioned in this sort of discussion, is that there are social pressures to cause languages to diverge as well as to converge. Often, people want to be understood clearly only by members of a subculture, for one of many reasons – for instance, simply to signal that you are part of a subculture to other members of it. You might think of this as related to the issue of privacy, and to the right of cultures to resist assimilation.
During the “Ebonics debate” in Oakland, California, I remember several people pointing out that it’s generally known that the best way to learn a language is through immersion in the culture of that language – and that you can’t get more immersed in the culture of “standard English” than black children already are. That, in fact, most black people would switch between Black English and “standard English” frequently, and that the differences between the two were staples of black humor.
When I played EVE Online, it stood out to me that, by and large, players who were from countries where the primary language wasn’t English, would write “standard English” that I found very easy to understand. The people who I found hardest to understand were people from the US and UK, who would write in dense “leetspeak”. When asked not to do that, they’d respond with a mix of anti-intellectualism and nationalist/nativist bigotry. It became clear to me that they weren’t writing in “leetspeak” out of laziness or ignorance, but specifically to set themselves apart from non-native speakers of English.
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I don’t understand. I’m already listening to NPR, I’m expecting the expert to give an answer, my ears don’t need an appetizer. (Nor a synonym for “pay attention.”)
If I’m not already in “listen-to-spiel mode”, can’t be, and/or don’t wish to be, the LAST thing I’m going to be doing is listening to NPR.
You’re way overthinking it. There’s no logic there. Speech is like genes, there’s a lot there not coding for anything directly. Not all of the sentence bears a direct meaning. After all, what does “um” mean? So, better yet, “verily”?
Granted, not every utterance means something directly, but they don’t come out of nowhere. “Um” doesn’t mean “I need to pause before continuing”, but that’s often what causes it. Although “so” here doesn’t mean as such, I believe it comes from failure to engage in a dialogue by using a pre-rehearsed* monologue.
In conversation, “um” is usually forgiven, if perceived at all. But in an oral presentation it can grate, because prepared speech is expected. Similarly, “so” can grate if the speaker is expected to engage in a dialogue, but seems to be forcing a monologue into the format.
*Not post-rehearsed, which is the worst sort for the anguished performer, and often the audience, too.
In conversation, I find a sentence starting with, “So…”, often signals that we’re wrapping up the initial chitchat and moving to the important topic. It’s a signal to start paying closer attention to what’s said.
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Going back to my example from Beowulf, this is the meaning that Seamus Heaney was aiming for in his translation:
Conventional renderings of hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘behold’, ‘attend’ and – more colloquially – ‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, ‘so’ it was:
*So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
Words like uh, so, well etc. are known as discourse-pragmatic markers - they don’t necessarily have a propositional meaning, but they do have a variety of functions that can affect the sentence in other ways, such that second language learners need to learn to use them correctly. My favourite discourse marker that I’ve heard was “Coño, …”, which was used by a Spanish colleague when talking to our mutual boss. I guess it doesn’t have the same level of offensiveness in Spain.
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In terms of content, this is very much off topic, but I found myself paying attention to the filler words–especially “So”, when listening to this interview.
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/13/370612995/how-putins-kleptocracy-made-his-friends-rich
I work for a multinational that uses English as its corporate language, and often help to vet job applications and interview potential new hires. Many speak varieties of Globish, and that is fine. My co-interviewers are often not native English speakers. But some people have real trouble making themselves understood to either of us. The people who have English as a second language are usually fine, it is the ones who have a fringe version of English as a first language that we both struggle with. And yes, that is often people from a black British background. If we struggle, then so will our equally Globish clients and subcontractors. So it is a problem for us, and for them (but mostly for them).
I don’t have an answer.
Bob.
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Drop the notion that such thick and unintelligible regional/subcultural accents are something good and diverse and support-worthy, and address it with education from early age.
…edit: and teach kids spelling with the standard alphabet. The Spelling Bee would then sound like a military comm but that’s small price to pay for more reliable communication habits.
No. We need diversity. If only one dialect retains some words, that dialect sheds likght on older texts using those words. Without that, we end up in the situation where we don’t know what witch and wih and countless other words really mean and whether one is really derived from the other.
Even if this got us from the western alphabet [and the most common military alphabets i the western world use the western alphabet] to some adaptation of the standard alphabet [like with the various Greek alphabets, Coptic, Gothic, Slavonic, etc.] it wouldn’t be worth it.
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On one hand this is true. On the other hand, are we willing and able to pay the cost of maintaining unintelligible accents in the form of supporting unemployable people?
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Our society isn’t willing to pay the cost of respecting human life in the form of supporting unemployable people and not killing disabled people.
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The spelling bee… ah, yes, the spelling bee.
My spouse lost the state bee as a child because she was given the word “arsenic” which in the official’s downstate accent was pronounced “ah-snik” - no “R” and two syllables. Up-state and mid-state we pronounce it “arr-sen-nick”, three syllables. After exhausting her allotted repeats, she gamely spelled it as it sounded, having never heard that pronunciation before, and lost.
My son made it to the state spelling bee a couple of times and won his grade as well as placing in the overall (pretty good for a 4th grader competing against 8th graders) but he too fell victim to the regional accent of an official at one point… you can imagine his mother and grandmother’s reaction. I thought there was going to be a lynching.
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I feel her pain. Same thing happened to me in the 1984 San Diego County Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee. The official was a tad marblemouthed. At the end of the bee it was just me and eventual winner (and future Jeopardy! contestant, I’m told) Sascha Dublin. I step up to the mic, and the guy reads out a word that sounds like “rivingly.” Hmm. That doesn’t sound right. Could he repeat the word? “Rivingly.” No help there. Could he provide a definition? “In a riving fashion.” Okay, happy-ass, I think I know how adverbs work. Sheesh. Could he use it in a sentence? “He fell rivingly to the ground.” Well, that should help… but it doesn’t. So I heave a sigh and start spelling “R-I-V-I-N-G-L-Y” knowing I’ve never seen such a word, but honestly hopeful that maybe I just haven’t read quite enough yet.
Nope. Of course he was saying “writhingly,” and of course Ms Dublin knew how to spell it (as did I, had anyone asked me to spell “writhingly” and not “rivingly”), and with her next word “pirouette,” she won, and was off to the DC National Bee. My ego never recovered and today, while a quick Googling reveals that Professor Dr. Dublin, MD, PhD, has gone on to make quite a respectable name for herself, I’ve wasted all that pre-Bee potential by working on mass-produced TV shows and hanging out on the internet all day talking with you lot.
I really hate spelling bees now.
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You could probably at least ameliorate this problem by having officials with different accents, and allowing contestants, if they don’t understand it the first time, to hear how each official pronounces it.
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As someone who lost the few crucial points at a chemistry olympiad because of a concentration gradient in a master flask we were getting the standard solution from, I feel your pain. (The difference between the result we should get and the result we got was strongly correlating with the lab table position. Talk about major oops.)
That blue glass cup should’ve been mine!
Edit: Since then, when about to handle a solution in a bottle that has to have known concentration, I flip the bottle upside down a few times. Solutions tend to settle under certain conditions and I learned my lesson from someone else’s mistake.
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