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.
Beowulf has a Scandinavian background to the story. Shortly after "hwæt", it mentions "gar-Denas" or spear Danes. (Old English had become heavily influenced by Norse by the time of the Norman invasions, especially in ita northern dialects.)
There may be a Celtic influence upon it as well, as with some of the Icelandic sagas, but you would have to dig much deeper for that.
The language and style of Beowulf is Old English, though. Old English was a West Germanic language, already closely related to the North Germanic Old Norse and mutually intelligible to a high degree.
But it doesn't make sense to say "such interjections were unlikely to be used by speakers of Nordic languages in order to begin a tale" without some sort of explanation for the focus on "Nordic" languages. Subsequent comments have made it clear that the commenter is under the mistaken impression that Old English was a Nordic language. It was not.
Actually, the introduction of Old Norse in Britain began in the early 5th century and by the time of Beowulf, Old English was still more than 90% a Nordic language. The Norman invasion of 1066 changed that dramatically (as Old French became the "new" official language) and to this day Modern English could reasonably be considered mostly French, then Latin, and only in small part Nordic (although the most common words used are by majority derived from Old Norse counterparts.) Oddly enough, only a few Celtic words made it into the language.
Germanic and Celtic languages have been in contact for at least two thousand years. Probably longer. There are Celtic loanwords in English which predate the Anglo-Saxon invasions. After the invasion, English took centuries to expand into areas which spoke P Celtic, and it seems to have profound influences on its verbal structure. Another wave of Celtic loanwords entered English via French.
As for modern English, there are numerous Celtic loanwords and calques in American, Canadian and Australian slang and dialect.
Old English is not considered to have evolved from a Nordic language.
Old Norse was a North Germanic language. Old English was a West Germanic language. They were mutually intelligible to a significant degree, since both were Germanic languages that evolved from the hypothetical common ancestor Proto-Germanic, but saying Old English was "90% a Nordic language" is like saying that humans are 90% chimpanzees. Both evolved from a common ancestor, one did not evolve from the other.
When the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons arrived in England around fall of Rome in the early 400s, the "official" language was Latin (as Britain had been a Roman colony since 43 AD) whereas locals spoke various Celtic dialects. The newcomers brought with them Scandinavian tongues and for the next 500 years or so Old English developed with minor changes (with sparse inclusions from Latin and Celtic influences). That all changed in 1066 with the Norman Invasion where Old Northern French became the new official language. (French also began as a Nordic language, but over time only a few hundred or so words remained, with the rest being mostly Latin-based.) As far as Modern English is concerned, while only ~20% is based on Old Norse, those words form more than 80% of what is most commonly used on a day-to-day basis.
I agree with Dr. Walkden here. While it was used as an interjection at times (just as it is today when someone exclaims, "What?!") in the context of the opening line of Beowulf "hwæt" is more likely being used to reformulate a statement in order to convey a sense of emphasis. An example in modern English would be something like, rather than saying "That was a gorgeous sunset!", one says "What a gorgeous sunset that was!". (Notice that the verb has now moved to the end of the sentence. In fact if you look at the last word of the line in question, we have the verb "fremedon" which means "performed", so indeed the placement of "what" at the beginning of the line facilitates the restructuring of the sentence in such a way that makes it "sounds right".)
Yeah—I'm reminded of the opening sentence of Slaughterhouse Five, which goes, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Kurt Vonnegut isn't worried that you're not listening; he's trying to create a sense of intimacy and emphasis, as one who is taking you aside to tell you something crucially important which he fears you may dismiss out of hand.
It seems intuitive to me that the "hwaet" functioned more as a literary device than as a simple call for attention. It is, after all, a poem.
People are saying that the interjection interpretation is influenced by its use as interjection in Shakespeare’s time. By that time what/hwæt was being used differently than the way it was when Beowulf was authored hundreds of years before.
Nevertheless I do think it is safe to say that such interjections were used, at least on a day-to-day basis. (Bear in mind that relatively few Old English texts survive to this day and almost certainly not many were produced to begin with. Old Norse itself was for the most part a spoken language, unlike Latin for example, and its predecessor which developed in England only started to be written down because of external influences.) Point is, all of the Nordic languages employ interjections akin to "Ah!", "Oh!", "Why?!", "Indeed!", "How?!", etc. So there really isn't any reason to think that such things wouldn't exist in OE as well.
Those aren't interjections in other Germanic languages, they're called modal particles. Norwegian:
"Det er sant." That is true.
"Det er vel sant." That's true, I suppose (resigned).
"Det er nok sant." That's true, I suppose (serious).
"Det er da sant." That's true, come on.
German also has them, though I'm not confident enough to explain the fine difference between "Das ist wahr" and "Das ist noch war".
English maybe has some remnants of them, but they're rare and probably a bit more archaic. You can say "That is yet true", and the "yet" there doesn't necessarily imply that you think it might not be true in the future. You probably understand what I mean if I say "That is but true" but it sounds very archaic. Usually you have to invoke a full adverb to signify mode in English ("That's actually true")
Black American English has "true dat", which before it was a 1990s catchphrase was also used to express both emphasis as well as resignation to a state of affairs, eg "I need to get a job!" "True dat"
It could also have been both, as well. In the immediate moment it functions as an interjection and as the rest of the sentence develops it fills in a pronoun gap. Like starting a shanty with a loud, slow single syllable to get attention (and maybe catch others on to the key) and that still being also a part of the first line of the song.
To be fair, the origins of "hello" go back much further than 600 years. Variations of it appear in Old Icelandic from almost 1000 years ago, and if you look at Old English texts from hundreds of years before that you will find greetings such as "Wes þū hāl!" (or roughly, "May you be well!"). In other words, all are based on salutations which have most likely been in use in one form or another for at least two millenia (if not longer).
Yeah, it seems Nordic, Nordic languages still have an archaic native version that could be the proto-hello: 'Hil' meaning 'be greeted', surviving as 'hail' in English, or, somewhat infamously, 'heil' in German.
Most LLM's these days tend to be strongly "left-leaning". (Grok being one of the few examples of one that leans "right".) Personally I'd prefer if they were trained without any political bias whatsoever, but of course that's easier said than done given that such lines of thought are present in so many datasets.
I couldn't get it to do much. Also noticed a subtle bug here:
next = compile(read(buffer), cons("halt", NULL));
C doesn't guarantee the order in which arguments to a function are processed. Since 'cons' relies on 'read' being called first, the result is undefined behavior. (In fact I had to fix that before it would even "run" on my system.)
