To (maybe) wrap up this topic, which was started I think by Jansy's question about the pronunciation of C in various languages, the split between Indo-european (IE) languages that pronouce C as K and those that pronounce it as S (in words derived from the same IE root) is called the centum/satem split, and it's a very well-known phenomenon in IE historical linguistics. You can read quick summaries at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satem and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
or you can google the two words (centum satem) for more detailed info.

 

John Rea is of course right that orthography and specific letterforms have little to do with pronunciation, though they're often etymological clues that can be decoded if you know the correspondences and sound-shifts that occurred historically in the IE language family. The various written and printed forms of the sigma, in contrast, have solely to do with the way Greek was written at various points during the archaic, classical, hellenistic, and medieval periods, and the way it was printed at various points in the history of Greek typography from the Renaissance forward--much like Rea's example of the variant 's' forms, traces of which persisted until printers finally abandoned the long f-shaped 's'. Getting back to Nabokov, I don't think the G, K, and S of PF's index have anything to do with the pronunciation of those letters in various languages, nor do I think VN had any interest in IE sound shifts per se. But I definitely agree with Victor Fet that orthographic shif ts b!
 et!
ween various languages (Russian, German, English, Zemblan) enabled Nabokov to plant some very telling clues, such as Zembla = Semblerland.

 

Mary Bellino