{"id":46864,"date":"2020-03-13T18:38:27","date_gmt":"2020-03-13T17:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=46864"},"modified":"2020-03-25T11:41:24","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T10:41:24","slug":"jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-hooping-cough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2020\/03\/13\/jeffrey-aronson-when-i-use-a-word-hooping-cough\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Hooping cough"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hw\u00e6t!<\/span><\/p>\n

Several Old English poems begin thus, followed immediately or soon after by some variant of \u201cwe have heard \u2026.\u201d. The best known example is that of <\/span>Beowulf<\/span><\/i>, which dates from between 1200 and 1300 years ago. Here are the first three lines, with my own translation in parallel text:<\/span><\/p>\n

Hw\u00e6t w\u0113 G\u0101r-Dena\u00a0 in gear-d\u0101gum<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0We have heard, no doubt, of the bygone glory\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00fe\u0113od-cyninga\u00a0 \u00ferym gefr\u016bnon<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0of the kings who courageously ruled the Danes.<\/span><\/p>\n

hu \u00f0\u0101 ae\u00feelingas\u00a0 ellen fremedon<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 And those peerless princes\u2019 heroic exploits.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note the absence of an exclamation mark after the first word. As the manuscript of <\/span>Beowulf<\/span><\/i> held in the British Library (MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv) shows, the original contained no exclamation mark. Indeed it contained no punctuation marks at all. Jakob Grimm, in his <\/span>Deutsche Grammatik<\/span><\/i> (1837) introduced an exclamation mark after \u201cHw\u00e6t\u201d, contending that it was purely an exclamation. But it has been suggested that it is no exclamation at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

I first read <\/span>Beowulf<\/span><\/i> in 1959, in a prose translation by David Wright, first published in 1957 in Penguin Classics, and have since accumulated more editions. Most of them translate \u201cHw\u00e6t\u201d as some form of exclamation (Figure 1). But in 2013 George Walkden <\/span>argued<\/span><\/a>, from an examination of instances of \u201chw\u00e6t\u201d in Old English texts, that the word was not an interjection, but \u201can underspecified <\/span>wh<\/span><\/i>-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause\u201d and \u201cparallel to <\/span>how<\/span><\/i>\u201d, as in \u201cHow you\u2019ve changed\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

KW<\/sup>O was the IndoEuropean root of a range of relative and interrogative pronouns, like the Latin quis, quis, quid, and adjectives, like qui, quae, quod. In Old Germanic words it became <\/span>hw<\/span><\/i>, whence it entered Old English. This spelling persisted until the late 13<\/span>th<\/span> century, but by the 12<\/span>th<\/span> century it was already beginning to be replaced by <\/span>wh<\/span><\/i>, perhaps affected by words that came from different IndoEuropean roots, such as whelk (from WEL, to turn or roll), whip (from WEIP to vacillate or tremble ecstatically), and whit (from WEKTI, a thing). Some 13<\/span>th<\/span> century spellings used <\/span>qu<\/span><\/i>, or in Scotland <\/span>quh<\/span><\/i>, as in the family name Colquhoun. Furthermore, dialectic variations in pronunciation led in some cases to omission of the aspirate (Figure 2).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The spelling of \u201chw\u00e6t\u201d tells you how it was pronounced. First an aspirated <\/span>|<\/span>h<\/span>|<\/span>, then the voiced bilabial <\/span>|<\/span>w<\/span>|<\/span>. The digraph <\/span>|<\/span>\u00e6<\/span>|<\/span>, called aesc, is pronounced like the flat <\/span>a<\/span><\/i> in ash.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Chambers Dictionary<\/span><\/i> (12<\/span>th<\/span> edition, 2011) includes about 150 headwords beginning with <\/span>wh-<\/span><\/i>; almost all are pronounced <\/span>(h)w<\/span><\/i>; for example: what (descended from \u201chw\u00e6t\u201d), when, whither, whop, whup, and why. There are two groups of exceptions:<\/span><\/p>\n