On 30/11/06 23:01, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:

There is also strangely PF-relevant (and Zemblan-sounding) Russian tongtwister: "Karl u Klary ukral korally" (Karl stole Klara's corals)...crown jewels?
Victor Fet

 
By a remarkable coincidence, I just began to read a Russian translation of "Philosophie der Mystik" (1885) by Carl du Prel, a German author (1839-1899) who was very popular in the Russia of VN's youth and who interests me in connection with Ada. Note the unusual (for a German) spelling of his first name and the fact that "Prel" is an anagram of perl (Russian for "pearl"). Now, if we pick out from the middle of the English word the superfluous "a" and add it to the writer's last name, we'll get aprel (Russian for "April"), the month in which Du Prel (and also VN) was born. Besides, prel' is Russian for "rot" and "Carl du Prel" means in Russo-French something like "the rotten Karl."

Alexey Sklyarenko   

 
Alexey: the choice of Carl over Karl is no surprise to us mathematicians. The greatest German EVER was christened CARL Friedrich GAUSS (1777-1855). My first-wife’s parents paid similar homage, naming their daughter Margaret Rose (Jones) from which you can guess her birth-year (1932). One of my sons is David Russell Bootle (after Hilbert [which is hardly useful as a pre-name] and Bertrand).

Your ‘coincidences’ are remarkably UNremarkable as proved by Victor Fet’s recent gematria, the irony of which has escaped some recipients! Underwood Dudley’s book on Numerology (is that Crank or Krank?) proves, for instance, that given ANY personal name, there exists a character-numerical mapping that gives that name a total of 666 (the so-called number of the name of the beast). Since when, I’m told, some scholars re-read the original relevatory mss as 616 not 666! Back to ze old hanging, quartering & drawing-board!

Carolyn: did you ever notice the followiing in VN’s “Despair?”

“But although I [the narrator Hermann] have never been an actor in the strict sense of the word, I have nevertheless, in real life, always carried with me a small folding theatre and have appeared in more than one part, and my acting has always been superfine; and if you think that my prompter’s name was Gain — capital G _not_ C — then you are mightily mistaken. It is all not so simple, my dear sirs.”

Here we have VN playing the role of ‘fratricidal ‘madman (an Able-acting-for-Gain Cain?) in addition to his typical role as world-class-word-golfer (a shining, symmetrical Tyger in the Woods). So, at least we have a specific OVERT case of G-C switching, whereas your PF theory assumes a COVERT G-C morph.

Stan Kelly-Bootle



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