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Re: Nabokov's use of foreign words
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[EDNOTE. Two additional posts on the use of foreign words in English, from Tom Seifrid and Jansy Mello. -- SES]
The charm of the anecdote about teaching 'Lolita' notwithstanding, and with
all due respect to my erstwhile colleague Dave Eggenschweiler, his LATimes
piece struck me as laboring toward a wittiness that in the end eludes him.
His grasp of linguistics is also questionable. The existence of dialects
such as Valley Girl slang and Ebonics does not in any way mean, as Prof.
Eggenschweiler's piece tries to suggest, that no such entity as "English"
exists. The idea that this entity, English, might be made the official
language of the United States has nothing to do with the founding of an
academy to uphold its purity, a doomed enterprise in any event, not least in
this country. But not to worry. We now have at our disposal a simple test
to determine whether an utterance is in English, or not: Dave Eggenschweiler
understands it, and it's not French.
Tom Seifrid
_________________
As SK-B observed, "Prof Eggenschwiler's LATimes op-piece is quite drole" (as
drôle as one of the sentences in it on how to "outrace...racial issues").
There is an interesting book ( "Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED", by
John Willinsky) that deals with the theme of the "purity of language" and
how it may be used to secure an empire and class dominance through the
regulation of words. We should remember that one of OED´s most assiduous and
erudite contributors wrote from a lunatic asylum ("The Professor and the
Madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Osford English
Dictionary", by Simon Winchester, 1998). The issue of madness and control
through words adds a poignant edge to VN´s totalitarian state as described
in Bend Sinister...
Jansy
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The charm of the anecdote about teaching 'Lolita' notwithstanding, and with
all due respect to my erstwhile colleague Dave Eggenschweiler, his LATimes
piece struck me as laboring toward a wittiness that in the end eludes him.
His grasp of linguistics is also questionable. The existence of dialects
such as Valley Girl slang and Ebonics does not in any way mean, as Prof.
Eggenschweiler's piece tries to suggest, that no such entity as "English"
exists. The idea that this entity, English, might be made the official
language of the United States has nothing to do with the founding of an
academy to uphold its purity, a doomed enterprise in any event, not least in
this country. But not to worry. We now have at our disposal a simple test
to determine whether an utterance is in English, or not: Dave Eggenschweiler
understands it, and it's not French.
Tom Seifrid
_________________
As SK-B observed, "Prof Eggenschwiler's LATimes op-piece is quite drole" (as
drôle as one of the sentences in it on how to "outrace...racial issues").
There is an interesting book ( "Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED", by
John Willinsky) that deals with the theme of the "purity of language" and
how it may be used to secure an empire and class dominance through the
regulation of words. We should remember that one of OED´s most assiduous and
erudite contributors wrote from a lunatic asylum ("The Professor and the
Madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Osford English
Dictionary", by Simon Winchester, 1998). The issue of madness and control
through words adds a poignant edge to VN´s totalitarian state as described
in Bend Sinister...
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm