Hi, Poopsie!
The way you explained this to me skypely made quick perfect sense. But the
xplanation below isn't quickly or perfectly understandable Do you need to
give all of that background stuff to her? Can you just begin with the bit
about the oral fribble and then go ahead and smack her with your discovery?
BTW, I'd phoned the desk clerk asking about refrigeration; she said she'd
try to locate a fridge for me. Then a coupla minutes ago a knock on the
door---a guy with a hefty piece of furniture on a dolly! He rolled it right
here next to the desk, plugged it in, and now I have a sizeable
fridge/freezer----and microwave! Pizza's coming in an hour! Awesome!
Feel free to send me a revised version, if you want to bother with one, of
Yogh-Gate.
Yr Interested and Determined G about to read the metrics section and a
coupla poems from Michael Alexander's The Earliest English Poems. Any you'd
particularly recommend?
2008/11/29 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>
> This question is for Candice, mostly, I'd guess ...
>
> (I hope that any assertions which follow are correct, and that Candice will
> correct me if I've got this wrong.)
>
> The orthoglyph "g" wasn't present in Old English script. Instead, what we
> have is the yogh (3), which represented two distinct sounds, <g> (as in
> modern English "get") and <y> (as in modern English "yet").
>
> [It gets even *more complicated when we come to Middle English ...]
>
> In modern editions of the text, yogh is transcribed as "g" (sometimes, as
> in Klaeber but not Michael Alexander, with a dot above when the letter "g"
> represents the soft rather than the hard variant of the MS yogh).
>
> (Quite a chunk of Klaeber's Beowulf is available to be peeked at online,
> fortunately:
>
>
> http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-aPwc3lUltsC&pg=PP1&dq=beowulf+klaeber&as_brr=3&ei=dqYvSeqdNYLmygSwyqjbBw#PPA3,M1 )
>
> Now, the question I have regards the first line of the poem, and shows up
> even more clearly in line 13:
>
> {Below, I've replaced Klaeber's dotted-g with an upper case "Y".}
>
> Hwaet, we Gar-Dena in Yeardagum ... (1)
>
> Yeong in Yeardum, thone God sende ... (13)
>
> _Beowulf_ alliterates the <g> and the <y> sounds represented in the MS by
> "3" -- how come?
>
> This is currently doing my tiny brain in ...
>
> Given that the poem was originally an oral composition, this would seem to
> be independent of the *orthographical identity of the way the sounds are
> represented in the manuscript, so I'm guessing that either, when the poem
> was composed, the sounds were closer to each other than they were by the
> time it was first written down, or that they were so similar that
> alliteration was perfectly acceptable. Or both.
>
> Help!!!
>
> R.
>
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