Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Si, So & Ta

Si

Si — An alternative to the seventh note, ti, in the solfège system. See also: Do.

So

So — Therefore, Then, Very, Truly… I could go on. With twenty definitions in Webster’s, ranging from intensifiers to transitioners, to impliers, ‘so’ is so versatile. But what I like most about ‘so’ is how it’s often used to start a story.

That’s something Seamus Heaney understood when he published his 2012 translation of Beowulf. One of the oldest written stories in Old English, Beowulf is a riveting tale of a mercenary king who fights to protect the Danes from monsters and dragons, before dying a hero’s death. Here are the first couple of lines from the poem:

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

If there’s something that stands out, it’s how impenetrable Old English is for Modern English speakers. I’m guessing most people understand that Old English isn’t just Modern English with a bunch of ‘thees’, ‘thous’, and ‘ye olde shoppes’. But I’m also guessing many people would expect to recognize at least a single word in two sentences. You can, by the way. The word ‘in’ doesn’t need translation.

Beowulf has been translated many, many times over. The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies annotated over three hundred translations back in 2003. But one of the most commonly cited is the Frances B. Gummere translation. I have two guesses for why this might be. One is because his 1909 translation was given the immediate prestige of showing up in the Harvard Classics series of 1910. And the other is that the translation neatly fits in the public domain. Gummere’s translation has propagated for some of the same reasons that the 1912 version of the Webster Dictionary still occasionally pops up for definitions in citations. I’m sure there are other, more complex reasons why Gummere’s translation persists, but I’ll leave those answers for the Beowulf scholars.

The important thing is that for many people, this is the most recognizable version of Beowulf’s opening sentences:

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!

That’s oblique, but comprehensible. The ancient scribe begins the epic of Beowulf by praising the kings before him. He’s establishing a mighty lineage that rose up through the ranks of Danish spearmen. And if you think those guys were great, wait’ll you get a load of Beowulf. It’s a good start to an epic poem, full of pomp and thunder.

Some of this translation is built around the first word: Hwæt. While the word translates as the Modern English word ‘what’, Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm also suggested that it was often used as an interjection, causing the word to be translated as ‘Lo!’, ‘Listen!’, ‘What ho!’, or ‘Hear me!’. But according to linguist Dr. George Walkden, it’s more likely that hwæt is “an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.” It doesn’t neatly translate, but the idea is that using hwæt in this way is the rough equivalent of opening Beowulf with “How about them kings of the Spear-Danes, huh?”

Which is why Heaney’s 2012 translation stands out so much in comparison. I’m taking another cue from Walkden who points out that exclamation points didn’t exist in Old English, and any attempt to add anything but a period or an occasional semi-colon to an Old English text is a tool modern translators use as a call for excitement, which may not have been the original author’s intent.

The end result feels very different from Gummere’s bombastic opening:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

The sentence ‘So.’ sets us up for a very different reading of the first few sentences. Instead of an actor strutting and fretting his hour upon a stage, fighting to capture the audience’s attention, The Heaney-Walkden opening feels like a friend was asked to tell a story, agrees with a nod, takes a sip of their mead, then starts in. According to Walkden, Heaney’s use of ‘so’ “obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.” Instead of presuming that the author is struggling to capture the attention of an audience who knows nothing about his tales of yore, this translation infers our author is re-hashing old tales. We’ve all heard about the princes’ heroic campaigns. It’s almost apologetic, but our storyteller is methodical and is establishing a common ground among all the listeners to build their story upon.

~

Ta

Ta — An alternative to the seventh note, ti, in the solfège system. See also: Do.

Also, an abbreviated form of ‘thanks’, as spoken by toddlers and the British.

[A side note: No dictionary I’ve found mentions that ‘ta’ can be used to say ‘goodbye’. Wiktionary lists ta-ta, tata, ta tah, ta-tah, tah tah, and tah-tah all as options, but no ‘ta’. That said, I am certain I’ve heard actors in movies use ‘Ta~a!’ in an ascending, then descending pitch. Often it’s the snobby, rich, and occasionally villainous characters who are using it to dismiss someone. Either way, there’s no official entry, so back to thanks.]

I’m sorry, to those who were taught otherwise, but I need to start by dismantling a common folk word origin. Many Englishfolk are proud to remind you of their Anglo-Saxon heritage and are happy to explain that ‘ta’ finds its origins among similar Norse words for ‘thanks’. They often point to the word ‘tak’, which means ‘thanks’ in Danish, for ‘proof’. This story gets retold here and there on the Internet, but I’m going to cite the top definition at Urbandictionary.com as proof that it’s a popular idea with over two thousand upvotes.

It’s impossible to prove this idea wrong, but it almost certainly is. There is no record of ‘ta’ printed anywhere as an alternative way to say ‘thanks’ until the late 18th century. And when it does start to appear, it’s commonly explained as a word that toddlers say, because it’s difficult for them to pronounce ‘th’ and ‘ks’. And this lines up well with history, because the existence of ‘ta’ combines neatly with the idea of a new middle class in Great Britain with pronounced expectations of etiquette and childrearing, that would have encouraged little children to say thanks even before they understood what the word signified.

But now that ‘ta’ is baked into the British and Australian parlance, no one wants to admit that it was originally a baby word. Look at the Danes! They use tak! That’s probably where it comes from. Stop digging any deeper than the national pride invoking surface explanation!

So ‘ta’ is short for ‘thanks’. And ‘thanks is short for ‘thank you’. And ‘thank you’ is short for ‘I thank you.’ And the word ‘thank’ is a derived from the word ‘think’, so ‘I thank you’ is short for ‘I think of you’. And ‘I think of you’ is short for “You did something kind for me, so now and in the future I will think upon this kindness.” That’s your true etymology for ‘ta’, and I think it’s far more impressive to realize how much is being said with only two letters.

Saying ‘ta’ or ‘thanks’ is so ingrained as a cultural coin, that I think it’s important we occasionally step back and think about what we’re saying, and what kind of cost it has on us. As a counter-point to good educators and mentors who tell us we should say thanks and often, the parenting educator Alfie Kohn offers the challenging opinion that “making children express gratitude they don’t feel, meanwhile, just like forcing them to apologize when they’re not sorry, mostly teaches them insincerity.”

The Buddha may have agreed with Kohn on some points. Constantly saying ‘thank you’ could be thought of as another instance of ‘the second arrow’. The first arrow hurts. But according to the Buddha, the second arrow, which is fired from our own bows to hit ourselves, can be many times more painful. When we judge, criticize, or shoulder the blame of others on ourselves, we can be letting the failings of other people become our failings. And when we say ‘thank you’ and don’t mean it, we might be doing serious damage to ourselves. We might be accepting other peoples’ false modesties as gifts while belittling our own abilities and commitment. We could be teaching ourselves the values of concession and placating others, instead of doing the hard work that is determination or forgiveness.

This isn’t to say that saying thanks is unimportant. On the contrary, I personally think it’s incredibly important to say thanks, and often. But what people like Kohn seem to want to remind us is that the word ‘thanks’ shouldn’t be lip service. We shouldn’t thank people because there is some imagined penalty in our mind for when we don’t do it. We shouldn’t be made to feel that our livelihood is held in the hands of a whimsical god, whose fingers are always on the verge of letting everything we hold dear slip between them. Fear and guilt should not be the primary motivators for saying thank you. We should be thankful because we are thankful. We should say thank you because it is important to us to be honest and open, and because we recognize that our lives are made better by the people who have helped us, either directly or incidentally.

And by the way, thanks. Thank you to anyone who is reading this, whether this is the first thing you read by me, or you’ve been following me for some time. Every single one of you readers are important to me, and my life as a writer would be meaningless without you. Ta.