Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

The meaning of “Hwæt”

Elaine Treharne from Stanford is tweeting The Dream of the Rood, because that is the kind of thing she does.  I thought I’d better find out something about the poem, so I headed over to the Fount of All Knowledge to read up.

Hwaet from "Dream of the Rood"There, at the beginning of the poem, is the familiar “hwæt”, and with the the clarity that comes from being at the bottom of my first mug of tea, I suddenly knew how to translate that word.  It means:

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<HTML lang="ang">

This seems like an obvious web-nerd concept, but the three biggest search engines agree that they can’t find it out there, so I’m writing it down here. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that  there’s an ISO-639 language code for Old English. (Middle English is “enm”.) No one has established an SGML document type definition for parchment manuscripts, perhaps due to the shortage of monks, so I had to invent that one.

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1 Comment

  1. We’re not worthy.

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