Comment by spyrja
16 hours ago
Not really. It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale. (On the other hand in Latin and Celtic traditions, interjections were widely used in story-telling, eg. "Ecce!" and "Féach!" respectively). Old English speakers would have been more inclined to used interjections in a responsive context. For example, to the statement "The boat is taking on water!", one might respond "How?!". But to begin a conversation with an interjection, that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
> It does however help drive home the point that such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale.
Beowulf was written in Old English, which is not a Nordic language.
> ... any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
Similarly, Old English didn't develop from Old Norse.
> that just isn't consistent with what we see in any of the speech patterns found in languages which developed from Old Norse.
What's up with the phrasing? Old English isn't a language that developed from Old Norse.