Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] McDiarmid, Southey, etc.
From:
Stan Kelly <skb@bootle.biz>
Date:
Thu, 1 Jan 2009 14:00:25 +0000
To:
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>


But Tim, there's no lack of SCOTS OOT type dictionaries
available for Sassenacks ootside Hibernia
skb
On 30 Dec 2008, at 15:31, NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Dear All,
As a native speaker of  the so-called  "Lallans", born in Ayrshire, may
I remind Nabokophiles that the young VN had a Scots tutor, Mr Burness.
He may have been related to Robert Burness (later Burns), the poet of my
native Mauchline, where great aunt Poosie and her husband Wullie Gibson
were the proprietors of Poosie Nansie's Howff, the setting of Burns's
Jolly Beggars Cantata.  I speculate that Mr Burness (who turns up in
Pale Fire under another name)  introduced the young VN  to certain
Lowland Scots expressions.  It is unlikely that VN would have
encountered such terms such as "houghmagandie" in Cambridge, Berlin,
Paris, Stanford, Wellesley or Cornell.

Seasonally, lang may yer lum reek...

Tom Rymour


Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS: Nabokov and Machado
From:
Stan Kelly-Bootle <skb@bootle.biz>
Date:
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:47:43 +0000
To:
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

Jansy: a tiny correction to your “Stella often became Estela when as a girl's name.” The change is quite independent of its use as a girl’s name. Latin ‘stella’ attracted an initial ‘e’ in various Romance languages (‘star’ in Provencal: estelo*; Old French: estella; Modern French: e[acute]toile). This happened to so many Latin words (spero, I hope -> j’Espere!) that THERE MUST BE AN EXPLANATION! Yet, there is NONE!
Spellings chase random sound changes. (In English, they’ve not yet kort up!)

* Reminds me of the parallels between recent Pale Fire discussions of “literary” language-creation  (Zemblan; Lallans), and Frederi Mistral’s “revival” with his Felibriges of the Provencal language. Now there’s a tale: Mistral’s Nobel Lit Prize (1904) due largely to his Provencal epic
MIRÈIO
. (Later to be an opera by Gounod) Eat your heart out Kinbote!

Also: Victor Fet’s recent poem (Vosem minuta) praises the Sun whose life-giving rays take 8 minutes to reach us. (Victor, though, will know of deep-ocean theories for the origins of terrestial Life NOT requiring Photosynthesis!!) One of Mistral’s famous lines proclaims
"Lou soulèu me fai canta"
(The sun makes me sing).

skb
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