 This is Think Tech Hawaii, the community matters here. We're back. We're live. It's the five o'clock rock with Haruko Moma. Can I get that right? Yes, it's perfect, Jay. All right. Okay. And she's here to speak in a conference about Old English. And is this the one right here, this conference over here? Yes, that's me. I just gave this paper. I just gave this paper. She's from the University of Toronto now, but there's other schools we'll talk about. And the paper was entitled Later, Efric. Efric is a person's... Alfred. Alfred. Yes, very good. Alfred. You can be an Anglo-Saxonist, Jay. You're going to teach me a lot here. The John Collins Pope papers and the task of the translator. So we are talking, when you talk like that, you're talking about translating like a foreign language into the modern... That's the idea. Old English is so different from modern English. So let me get a handle on all this. I think this is going to be interesting to see who you are. Okay. You are the chief editor of the Dictionary of Old English at the University of Toronto in Canada, which is a great city. We'll talk about that. Yeah, it's great. Come visit me in Canada. Yeah, it's cold, though. It's now warm. Yeah. So now he's a good dog. Do you like Trudeau? He's so good looking. Good answer. Yes. And she is the Angus Cameron Professor of Old English Language and Literature and Professor of Medieval Studies and English. And she is a Japanese Anglo-Saxonist, so to say. That's right. Yes, you gave me my new title. I'm a jazz. Okay. And before she arrived in Toronto, which was only recently. A month ago. She taught at New York University, my school, for 25 years. And I went to the law school there. I went to the law school twice. It's not that I had to go twice. You chose to go twice. I chose to go twice for a law degree and then a master's in law degree. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. It helps me understand Old English. Yes, absolutely. At NYU Law School, it's a really good place. If you haven't noticed, she is originally from Japan. And she started studying at Hokkaido University. And then the big break, she got a scholarship to study at the University of Toronto. And it all, the rest is history, so to say. Absolutely. In fact, it's all history, isn't it? Yes. Old English is a 1,000-year-old language. So the other thing I wanted to mention in introducing you is that Caroline Lee gave me a copy of a speech. Is this the speech you gave? No, this is a speech you gave on June 20th. Yeah. For the St. George's Society. In Toronto. And I have members of my family who speak a lot. Yes. All over. And they always write it out like this in advance. Well, you see, I knew. And I was nervous, Jay, so I needed something to hang on to. Yeah. But it was fun. People liked it. People loved it. Where was that, the St. George's Society? Well, we had a, the President's Donner meeting. And one of the members has a beautiful house and gardens in, I think it's in North York. And, you know, having lived in Manhattan for 25 years, it was like a palace, huge. And a lot of people there, members of the society. And I talked about Old English. Well, that's the thing. You know, I come to believe that if you want to give a really good speech, you have to put the words in your mind somehow. And so you have to write it out. And I was reading this and I was saying, gee, this is really well written. The language flows. This was written by somebody for whom language must flow. Am I right? Do you see language differently than most human beings who walk on the street? That's a really good question. But I think when I'm myself, then language flows. And this was really about my experience, how I became interested in Old English in Japan and how I crossed the Pacific Ocean to... And a great language divide. That's right. And so it just flew naturally for me. Yeah. And I love to... What got you started in such a voyage, a journey? That's a really good question. Because I was just an ordinary English major in Japan. Yeah. Of which there are many. There are many. Of course, everyone loves to study English in Japan. Yes. And I was one of them. Yes. But I think my thing is that I like history. I like old things. So for me, the first Old English was Shakespeare. Hamlet or Hamlet of War. You say that with such loving tones. Yes. Who doesn't love Shakespeare? Pull me a piece. No, I'm too shy. And I can quote from Old English. Okay, I want that. Should I? Yes. Well, it doesn't sound like anything we know. But if it's okay, Beowulf. It's the beginning part of Beowulf. Now translate this for me. What does it mean? Yes. I'd like to know. It's about the poet. The idea is this oral culture, at least the idea. And everyone is having a good time at the banquet, drinking beer. And here is this court poet coming in to sing a song about the hero Beowulf. And everyone is so wrapped up with their own conversation. And in order to say, listen up, I'm here. What? You know, like the rap music. What? Right? So listen, right? We, you and I all know about the old glory of the Danes. Actually, the poem is not about the Anglo-Saxons or English people. They're all about the Scandinavians. And we know all these princes and heroes re-achieved great deeds. So don't we all know about these amazing people? So let's talk about them. So it's a really good way to be together, sharing the same culture. And I think that's why I love old English. It takes you there. Absolutely. It takes you a thousand years back. Absolutely. And you're living there. Just say, what? And then you go, yes, we are there. Right? Yes, we are there with the heroes and the queen. Yeah. Yeah. It's not fiction. It's real. Well, in the sense that, you know, there are some historical figures or legendary figures. So I'm very sure in olden days when this tradition really emerged, they must have been thinking about their ancestor or some superhero. It's really like superheroes, you know, today. That's part of the species, isn't it? We need heroes. We do. The leadership for who knows what to admire, to aspire. Yeah, absolutely right. And Beowulf was one of them. So who is Beowulf? That's a really good question. You know, I have my idea of Beowulf. You know, really handsome and, you know, really intelligent, really strong. You have a beard? Probably. Is hair long? You know, that's an interesting thing. Usually when you read older, later medieval poems like Lancelot, you know, we kind of, you know, Guinevere had like, you know, blonde hair and gray eyes. Beowulf doesn't tell you about this. It's not about how people looked, but what they did. So Beowulf saved the Danes by fighting with this cannibalistic monster, Grendel. That's what kind of monster is Grendel. Can we see it on late night TV? Well, you said you watched some, you know... I see some other things. Yeah, well, he is a cannibal. But what's really interesting... Grendel? Yeah. Grendel. Grendel. Yeah, Grendel. Yeah. He's a cannibal. Yeah, but he... Are they cannibals in Europe? Well, that's a really good question. Only in the fiction, yeah. Well, but you know, he is a descendant of Cain. So he is biblical. Cain? Cain, like Cain on Abel. Yes, yes. So he is a... Is this identified in Beowulf? Is it telling us? It's in the point. Because you see... The Bible, there's references and biblical references. Absolutely. You got it right. Because Beowulf is about this heroic age. Everyone is pagan. They don't know Christ, but the poet knows better. So he sees this world. Oh, it's a glorious world, but they were pagans. Oh, isn't this sad? But they had their glory. And even a pagan hero can fight with a Cain's descendant and have a true victory. And then he becomes a king. So I think that's why Beowulf is so appealing. Yeah, well, even if it's fiction, even if it... Because I'm not satisfied with fiction. I think it may be rooted in many ways in reality at the time. It teaches you so much about the way of thinking. Yes. The way of dealing with language, expressing yourself a thousand years ago. We don't know that from the movies. They don't really tell us. Oh. In fact, even the history books don't really tell us. You have to put flesh on those bones. The way you do it is through the poetry, no? Absolutely. So you see, there are stereotypes. If you have muscle, you don't have as much thinking in here. But Beowulf was powerful and smart at the same time. That's why I admire Beowulf. So he gives amazing speeches. He has this speech match with someone who challenges him. A speech match. Like a debate. Yeah, debate. Like, oh, you were that Beowulf. Didn't you lose that fight when you were young? And how dare? They're ranking each other. Yeah, but then he defeats his opponent by saying, well, you're right, Mr. Unfelth. I see your point. But this is a true story. And didn't you kill your own brother? I would never do that. So he is a winner through and through. It sounds like early political is what it does. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So the old English speakers and the Anglo-Saxons, they loved language, their language, their words, new words, interesting words like kennings. Have you heard of kennings? Kennings. Yeah. Okay, so, okay, here's a riddle. There is a word at the beginning of Beowulf, whale road. Railroad. No, not railroad. Close. Whale. Right. Whale like the creature in the ocean. So what does whale road together do you think means? It's a metaphor called a kenning. Well, so just imagine a whale driving the road. A whale road. Whale road. Rail. That's bad. Whale road. So the fish road. Fish road. Yeah, fish road. So it's the ocean. Yeah. Or this is easier. Okay. Heaven's candle. Heaven's candle. Yeah. What's that? There's a candle in the sky. Yes. It's the moon. The sun. The sun. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So those are called kennings. They really loved these world plays. Oh, did you get what I just said? Oh, I'm smarter than you. Oh, you got it right, you know. And that's how they communicated. They loved beautiful points. And metaphors and beautiful points. But the language was different. And it seems to me that, you know, as all things were provincial and local in those days and localities had, you know, different styles, different cultures, different ways of speaking, you could take the same subject matter from this place and articulate it in as close a way as possible in that place. But it was in different language because the words, the pronunciation was different. You're right. Yeah. So, you know, if you really want to know, I'm a philologist, Jay. Do you know what a philologist does? Words. It's all about words. I love words. Well, so, yeah, yeah. Close, you know. We love words. We collect words. The Anglo-Saxons talked about word, horde in our chest. You open your mouth. You let all these words come out, right? So, you know, and a philologist talked about dialects in Anglo-Saxon England, early West Saxon, Mercy and Northumbrian. I'm not going to bore you, but yes, they had so many different ways. You couldn't bore me. You sure? Okay. You know, I can later, you know, have a derivation of the word kazaum. Kazaum? Kazaum really means cheese in late Latin and how kazaum went through a number of sound changes to eventually become cheese. So, a philologist used to do such goofy things. I'm one of those goofy people. And dialects, they're all different. But what's really interesting is that they seem to have understood poetic words, you know, maybe they remembered from the past. Yes, they sound a little bit archaic, but if you love poetry, you know what these words are. Poetry ultimately sounds. That's right. And then when I grew up in New York, we had an expression that sounds a lot like what you were talking about earlier. Oh, what is it? It was this. You meet somebody in the street. You haven't seen them in six months. You get very close to them. You know, you're a little close. Yes. And you say, What? No, no, I didn't do that right. What? What? What? What? What? What? We can take a break now. We'll be right back. My name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. And I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. We're back. I told you we're coming back. Haruko Moma. And she's a professor of what? Of old English history, studies, poetry, what not, Bear Wolf and all those things back a thousand years ago. Yes, all of those things into one. That's me. Into one, yes. And she's dedicated her professional career to that. And you can see that she's dedicated in general to that as a person, as a human being person. And so... Take me. I am old English. Yes, exactly. And to a degree, you know, you can't be as good about that if you don't actually live in Old England. Oh yes, yes. Walk down the street and see the references and hear the callings and hear the poetry and everything. And I suppose when somebody tells you in the story, you know, that'll be a dollar and a half for the newspaper, you say, gee, I wonder what sounds there are sounds that emanated in Old English? Well, maybe. Okay, I can give you like an interesting example. I was talking with an anthropologist yesterday and he was, you know, he gave a really great lecture at the conference and so I said to him, well, you know, you must be, you know, observing, you know, as Anglo-Saxonist because he's an anthropologist. Like you would observe the, you know, the, you know, whatever culture that he was studying. And he got a little bit embarrassed. No, I'm not observing you. And then I said, well, but you see, whenever I see the world, I read the world as I would read an Old English text. I'm reading UJ as I would read Beowulf. Well, you know what you do when you talk that way is you're looking at me, not as I am today, but the accumulation of layers and generations, 20, 30, 50 generations, whatever it is, to take me back to that time. I am not who I seem to be. I am the legacy of that. I'm the current iteration of what was going on back in the time you're studying. Well, it's more like through you. You know, Jay, you're amazing and you're great. But the true you inside of you is even greater. And philosophers can really see, you know, look at you and somehow we understand what's inside you. And I think that I just read the world. Do you have trouble sometimes, you know, getting current? Yeah. For example, you know, high tech. I mean, 140 characters, I think they expanded that. 140 characters on Twitter. I mean, for example, what the president, your president and mine, I suppose, Donald Trump, you know, what he says in 140 characters, it may not be of the same quality of poetry as you may be studying. That is kind of true, but I think, you know, one word can tell us so much, 140. But I should like to point out that, you know, I'm now the editor of the dictionary of Old English. Yes. And this is a state-of-the-art lexicon. You know, it's all digitized. And okay, I don't do it. Our systems analysts can do these things. But so this is really a medievalist, Jay. That's a great honor. This is not a small thing. You're the editor of the dictionary of Old English. And how thick? Well, you see, it's so big because there are three million word occurrences in Old English. You cannot print that out. That's why everything is digitized. Ah, so it's not a book. Well, it's a digital book. It's got a corpus of everything we have from the Old English period has been digitized. And what we are doing right now, you know, what we editors are doing right now is to look at this corpus, checking each and every example, be that the word love, louvue, or I don't know, bishop, bishop, whatever word. We examine everything. And that's possible because of this latest technology. So we do both. Is it pronouncing? Is it a pronouncing dictionary? We should do that, shouldn't we? Yeah, that's the next page. So, but where do you start and where do you end? For example, you say, well, 1066. What was 1066? It was important to hear. That was the Norman Invasion of England. So stop there. That was, you know, September, 1066. That's it. You remember the date of the battle pastings? Well, that's what people used to say. Old English period ends, you know, in 1066. But we have a different view now because, you see, political change does not always, you know, mean. You know, 1066 people stopped talking Old English. Now we are speaking Middle English. It doesn't work that way. That's your next project. No, so it just went on. So actually the Old English Corpus I was telling you about, it really goes all the way to the 13th century. Sometimes they wrote down Old English writings, like sermons and homilies. They're really, really good and possessive. It was before the printing press. Yeah, so everything had to be done. Everything by hand on parchment. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Old English really is longer and more, longer lasting. Is it more beautiful than today's language? Well, I'm biased, so don't ask me, J. I think I know the answer. Yeah, I don't want to, you know. Well, let's assume it is. Why is it more beautiful? That's a really good question. You see, this is really about love. You know, when, you know, you just told, you know, the audience that I grew up in Japan and I was an English major. And I thought I liked the English language, but I liked Old English better than Modern English. Why? Now, you said before, I was about history. Well, it's just a way... It was like the intersection of history and language. No, that's what you said. It's just the way it sounded. Yes, I loved Bear Wolf when my Old English was good enough to be able to read Bear Wolf. You wrote your masters on Bear Wolf. Yeah, but even, you know, I wrote my... You have great memory, J. You're amazing. I wrote my honors thesis on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Okay. But it doesn't matter if it's in a biblical translation or a medical recipe or anything. It's just a language. It's so powerful. Yeah. Was it more powerful? Yeah. The thing about it is poetry, in my view, is always more powerful than street language. You know, the language of commerce, trade, daily life. Poetry is, by definition, inherent in the notion of poetry is, yeah, we thought about it. We thought about whether we are saying exactly what we want to say. Yeah, yeah. And whether the music of it is there, it has to have music. Yeah, absolutely. Language and music, yeah? Yeah. I mean, okay, I confess, you know, I'm biased and I love poetry. Yeah. And you're right. You know, I could never say it myself, but now that you expressed it in verse, now that was exactly what I was going to say. That's poetry, right? Yeah. And, you know, old English speakers composed beautiful poems. So it's just, you know, they're language. It's the ancestor of the English language. So, I mean, maybe that's why, you know, modern English is also powerful. It just goes back to that period. Yeah, well, right, it has roots. Yeah, yeah. It has roots. Absolutely. And I guess, you know, part of this bias you're talking about is if you listen to English today, it has deteriorated some of these things. The notion of poetry, the notion of music. Yeah. It's not the same as it was, say, a thousand years ago. Right. Especially when, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to get you to read. Which one? There's one thing in your paper there. Yes. I mean, you can find it faster than me. It's in italics here. Uh-huh. And it is so beautiful, but I don't understand it at all. Ah, here. Well, yes. Okay. This is from Geoffrey, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. And that qualifies for old English, right? It's kind of late, but it's still like true English. What year, roughly? He was from the 14th century. 14th century. That's why that's way after 1066. Middle English guy. Middle English. But his language is also really beautiful. Okay. I can't pronounce it, but maybe you can. And then you can... Oh, Jay, you can try it. I won't make it sound like poetry. Well, I don't know. You will work it. Okay, there it is. Yeah. Can you make the poetry for our sound system? For Iman. So people can... Well, I'm an old English person, but I can try. Okay. So it's the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, right? The general prologue. And it's really about, you know, when, you know, April kind of, you know, with its sweet shower has pierced the dryness of March to its roots. So that's what it means. But it's poetry. So... So March is dry. March is dry. The shower is the rain. Yeah, April is the shower month. And then all the flowers come out in May. Then... It's beautiful. Then people want to go on the pilgrimage to go to Canterbury. Hence the Canterbury Tales? That's right. So it's really about people going on their pilgrimages and the people telling stories. So it's like, but you know, okay, my millions of colleagues would, you know, say, Okay. Too much you can't. It would be better than what I could do. Well, that April, with his sure sote, the druhk of March has pierced Todorote. Does that sound like poetry to you? It does. Oh, good. It does. Yeah. But when everyone in, say, the year of 1400, would everyone understand that? Or would you have to explain that in some other context to make the average person understand that? Well, that's probably... This is for a more sophisticated audience, but we have to remember that in the Middle Ages, the learned people were supposed to know Latin. That means English was a vernacular language, not that prestigious. And what was amazing was that these poets, Chaucer, the Anonymous Bill of Poets, proved that, yes, Latin is the language of knowledge, you know, closer to salvation or something, but our humble vernacular language can move us. It can be really beautiful. So it's supposed to be for everyone, but everyone who speaks language of their own, but also who is mindful of the beauty of that language. So I think that's why Chaucer and the Bill of Poets were so great. Ah. Yeah. And did that guy aren't gimbled in the wave? Javawaki. Javawaki. Yeah, but Louis Carroll really made fun of Anglo-Saxons, but I think he really appreciated the culture as well. And Shakespeare. Yeah. Shakespeare is lots of the old English in Shakespeare, isn't it? Absolutely, because, you know, we say that Shakespeare really had the greatest vocabulary ever, at least in his generation, but even then more than 90% of the words he used really came from the old English period. Are you rooted in what people knew coming up through the generations? Absolutely. So I guess, you know, we were almost out of time. Oh, I could keep going. I'm so sorry we could do this all day. Yeah, yeah. We only began to explore it. Yeah. And I really appreciated your reading, but I have to ask you this question. Sure. Come the end. Okay. You're looking naughty, though. You're right. You're in my mind. It's a naughty question. Okay. So you studied this all your academic life. Yes. And you love it beyond description. I can tell. They can all tell. Yes. But they haven't studied it. They don't know anything about Beowulf these days. Or Chaucer, okay? Well... Maybe some do. Yeah, games totally like Beowulf. Beowulf left behind, you know. Oh, okay. They left this kind behind. So my question to you is... Well, okay. All the people out there who are listening today will listen tomorrow and the day after. Uh-huh. Why should they care about this? Yes, camera one. Can you tell them why? Well, A, it's really... Actually, it's the language you're speaking. And it's the powerful language. And if you know the past, you know the present. It's a really beautiful language. Poetry is wonderful. Well, give it a try. I'm very sure you love it. Because without the past, we are not complete. If you love the past, you respect people around you. I can't explain this. But it makes you a wiser, better, more insightful person. But if you doubt that, let me know. I can teach you how to read old English. And, you know, just let me know. I think I am right. Karuko Momo, it's been wonderful to talk to you. So wonderful to see you today. And I only have one other word to say. Oh, yes. What? What? What?