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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