Understanding なんて/何と言う as in なんて美しい人だ

Question

My understanding is that there are two meanings of なんて: one as a contraction of 等 + とて, and the other is as a contraction of 何と言う. I'm trying to understand this latter sort of usage.

Here's an example usage I found online:

なんて美しい美女だな。

which idiomatically translates to

What a beautiful woman.

But what, literally speaking, does なんて mean here? Is here なんて (= 何と言う) being used as something like an exclamatory phrase ("what!")?

[One] says "what", [she] is an is-beautiful woman.

Is this correct? And is this a reasonable morphing from the sentence's literal meaning to its more idiomatic translation?

[One] says "what", [she] is an is-beautiful woman. (literal translation)

"What!" an is-beautiful woman. (more idiomatic)

What an is-beautiful woman. (even more idiomatic)

What a beautiful woman! (fully idiomatic)

EDIT:: A related question/different way of looking at this is: what is the difference between using なんて and 何 here?

なんて美しい美女だな

なに美しい美女だな

Is the sentence with なんて just adding a bit of hearsay to the sentence (e.g. "They say she's a beautiful lady..")? Or is it also more emphasis ("What!" a beautiful lady)? Are these two sentences otherwise the same?

Answer 1

First, 美しい美女 looks ovbiously tautological, and な is normally not used with this exclamatory construction (presumaly because this construction is essentially a rhetorical question; see below). So let's use なんて美しい女性だ as an example.

It's true that なんて is etymologically なんという. You can safely use なんという in this construction, too:

• なんて美しい女性だ。
  なんという美しい女性だ。
  What a beautiful woman!

To further break down, なんという can be understood as an (interrogative) relative clause that modifies 美しい女性. Compare the following:

• (彼女は)アンという女性だ。
  She is a woman who one calls Ann.
  → She is a woman called Ann.
• (彼女は)何という女性だ？ (as a question)
  (She is a woman who one calls WHAT?)
  → How is the woman called? / What's the name of the woman?
• 何という女性だ！ (as an exclamatory sentence)
  なんて女性だ！
  (She is a woman who one describes as WHAT?)
  → She is a woman where one does not know how to describe!
  → What a woman!
• 何という美しい女性だ！
  なんて美しい女性だ！
  She is a beautiful woman where one does not know how to describe!
  → What a beautiful woman!

なに美しい女性だ is simply ungrammatical.

Answer 2

Here's an example usage I found online:

なんて美しい美女だな。

which idiomatically translates to

What a beautiful woman.

なんて美しい美女だな sounds awkward to me (as opposed to 美しい美女だな, なんて美しい美女だ, なんて美しい美女なんだ, なんて美しい美女だろう, etc), if not ungrammatical. It doesn't seem like a good example to learn from.

The only Google hit I found is from https://warosu.org/jp/thread/21903543 where most posts are in English. なんて美しい美女だな an isolated Japanese post, thrown without much context.