Thanks, SK. I’m loath to appear as a Bunny doomed forever to mangle the noble po-russki. But you have misread by comments on Don’s mooted Seb’ya-Sebastian connection. It’s moot whether Russian b and b’ are truly distinct morphemes* We structuralists see them as essentially allophemic.
A series of reductionist approaches made by many structuralists[1] have postulated an underlying deep structure wherein soft consonants are the result of phonological processes. Despite such proposals, linguists have long agreed that the underlying structure of Russian is closer to that of its acoustic properties, namely that soft consonants are phonemes in their own right.
[1] Stankiewicz, E. (1962), "[An Alternate Phonemic Analysis of Russian]: Editorial comment", The Slavic and East European Journal 6 (2): 131–132, doi:10.2307/3086098 [wiki: Russian phonetics]
Ob and ob’ may be distinctly written and pronounced “words,” but as prepositions/prefixes it’s not easy to see any systematic semantic difference. I welcome your counter-examples. Are there obXXX’s consistently different from ob’XXX’s? It may be significant that we have to use the hard-sign after ob to “override” the natural consonantal softening of a b before a soft vowel.
Could this be a historical quirk reflecting imported roots?
Bur my example in the DJ context was that the syllables \seb\ and \seb’\ were “semantically” identical, so that \seb’ya\ linking to \Seb\astian was phonetically plausible. Can you give me an example where sebXXX differs semantically from seb’XXX? If the differences are heard, they would be taken as “funny” pronunciations, not as a separate forms. Mutations have EVERYTHING to do with evolving sounds and emerging notions of phoneme and morpheme.
I was defending DJ’s right to seek links with Seb(astien) and Seb’(ya). The sort of cognates we seek straddling different languages are not vitiated by inevitable phonetic or phonemic differences between the two languages. IF (note the IF) the root \seb’\ moved around (space and time), there’s no saying how it might end up. We are rerunning the whole history of Comparative Philology! Names such as Sepp, Shep, Shef, even Seth and Sé are as plausibly related as Seb(astian) to \seb’\. Final consonants are vulnerable to GRIMM and other mutations: from hard to soft to missing! The sort of word-links and allusions popular with Nabokovians tend to be linguistically suspicious: either TOO obvious (seb’ya to Seb-astian), or purely coincidental (Shade and El Shaddai!). There’s general confusion between spoken and written language. Sounds change but spellings lag behind.
CK rightly objected to the Shade/El Shaddai link, but for the WRONG reason. Others wrongly objected to the Seb’ya/Sebastian link for the wrong reason! CK dismissed the link because the \a\ vowel sounded differently in Shade and El Shaddai! But we know both \a\ vowel sounds have changed. In early English, Shade was BI-syllabic: Shard-e. The big vowel shift circa 1400 gave us the current \ay\ sound: Shayd-e, then the final –e eroded away (no surprise). Hebrew vowels? Don’t ask.
* In English, b and b’ essentially allophemes; in fact the subtle palatizations our consonants exhibit seldom produce different words. (poor and p’ure are often cited, but p’oor means poor!)
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 30/05/2010 06:24, "Sergey Karpukhin" <karpukhin@WISC.EDU> wrote:
Actually, the Russian [b] and [b'] are different phonemes and the distinction is semantic (ob and Ob' are two different words, not "variants" of the same word) and has nothing to do with "consonantal mutation."
SK
----- Original Message -----
From: Stan Kelly-Bootle <mailto:stan@BOOTLE.BIZ>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 6:30 AM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Idle note on Sebastian (Knight)
Grigori: the deeper linguistic point is whether hard-b and soft-b are separate phonemes in Russian! The b-sound is simply influenced by the following vowel (hard a or soft yah). (As indeed is the s before the soft e!) The Russian syllables s’eb and s’eb’ are “semantically” identical. Don’s interesting connection between seb’ya and Sebastian, whether etymologically sound [sic] or not, cannot be faulted on the grounds of consonantal mutation.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 23/05/2010 11:47, "Grigori Utgof" <utgof@TLU.EE> wrote:
Dear Don,
Your explanation is great, but there's always be a matter of palatalization: the reflexive pronoun "себя" is pronounced with the soft [б'] (like in the Russian "ребята"), while the word "Sebastian" has the hard [б] in it (like in the Russian "башня"); see also: Русская грамматика. М., 1980. T. 1. C. 35-40.
All the best,
Grigori
On May 22, 2010, at 9:36 PM, Don Johnson wrote:
Food for (s)peculation.
"I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone neither of us knows"
None of the historical persons or places evoked by the name
seem to be obviously connected to VN's novel (see www below). In an idle moment it ocurred to me that the first syllable of the name echoes the Russian pronoun SEBYA meaning "one's self ." Given the tangled relationship between the narrating half -brother and his brother Sebastain, I wonder if this pseudo-etymology sheds any light on the novel.
Tennis, anyone?
Search the archive <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en> Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" <http://www.nabokovonline.com>
Visit Zembla <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage subscription options <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Search the archive <http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu=en> Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu> Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" <http://www.nabokovonline.com>
Visit Zembla <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> View Nabokv-L Policies <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Manage subscription options <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/>
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.