For my birthday, I received Don Ringe's From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic and I've been reading it while taking the train in to work.

I find that even though I'm not in academia any more it's refreshing to spend some time perusing hard-core historical linguistic geekery, particularly since I've never really delved into PIE with the depth that I should have. I suspect that many Anglo-Saxonists tend to skimp on their study of the linguistic pre-history of English, especially the earliest stages.

Note to the College Board: the correct transliteration for 'þ' is 'th', not 'p'.

I've finally started to go back to analyzing the SAT writing material to infer the College Board's views on grammar, and while flipping through the January 2008 SAT, my eye came upon this bit from a passage in a reading section about Ezra Pound's translation of the Old English poem "The Seafarer":

Moreover, there are unfortunately some mistakes, as when Pound misreads purh ("through") as pruh ("coffin").

I was contemplating a post about Old English metrical forms to mirror the last one on word order, but I'm leaving for England and Ireland at the end of the week and don't have time to come up with anything elaborate. So instead, I present for your philological amusement my translation of one of Aldhelm's Enigmata into Old English verse.

Ic eom huses weard,    holdscipes genoh,
bold wæccende,    bryce geardstapa.
On þearle niht    ic þeostre oferfare,
ne anforlæte    þæt eagena leoht,

A few days ago, a Language Log post mentioned an old Onion article about reverting the grammatical rules of English to something roughly equivalent to Late Old English. It's satire of course (something that seems to have gone over some people's heads), and the article doesn't actually follow a consistent practice.

The notion that Beowulf's nudity in the movie can be justified by the original poem seems to be floating around out there on the web. I seem to recall Neil Gaiman himself making that claim in an LA Times interview several months before the movie opened, so perhaps that's the origin of the idea. (I can't find a link for this article, though.)

I'm afraid, though, that that's a misreading (or at least reinvention). The relevant passage starts at line 661.

Ða he him of dyde, isern-byrnan,

In his review of Beowulf, Richard Nokes complains in passing of the pronunciation of scop. I presume he's referring to the initial consonant cluster rather than the quality of the vowel, which one could also complain about, although I think that's too subtle a difference to be really annoying.

A cute review of Beowulf in verse at Slate.

It would have been more impressive if the writer had tried to do it in alliterative verse.

In fact, that's one of the things that bugged me about the bawdy songs that are sung in the hall in the movie. They're in ordinary rhyming song meter with nary an alliterating half-line to be found.

In the movie Beowulf, The scop's oration during the "Beowulf Day" celebration is a bastardized version of Beowulf's fight with Grendel from the poem. It's a snippet of what we originally recorded, which managed to tell the whole fight, from Grendel coming off the moor to Beowulf raising Grendel's arm in victory in about 90 seconds.

I saw a screening of Beowulf last week but have been holding off commenting on it until it opened. I am not planning to post a review (since I worked on the film, I wouldn't exactly be objective) but I did want to make a few remarks on the use of language.

A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article on Beowulf in the L.A. Times that has just appeared.

I do want to point out that my remarks were paraphrased (as is fairly common with journalists), and so there are a few places where what I intended may not have been rendered quite accurately.