Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0010645, Wed, 24 Nov 2004 19:56:41 -0800

Subject
Fwd: Re: TT-21. MORTADELLA & HOPE
Date
Body
> No time for a more careful observation ( here it is almost two in the
> morning...)
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: D. Barton Johnson
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 12:23 AM
> Subject: TT-21. MORTADELLA DI FEGATO (liver mortadella)Donald B.
Johnson wrote:
>
> ----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
> Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 01:56:54 -0300
> From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
>
> Mortadella, according to my Portuguese dictionary, comes from the Latin:
> "murta", myrtle? ( "mit Myrthen und Rosen"... ) which were the leaves added
> for the preservation of meat ( either pork or beef ).
> -----------------------------------------------------
> EDcomment. I hadn't seen this when I earlier sent the "Mort-" = mortar
> derivation. Your dictionary might be right. Let's ask John who is a Romance
> philologist by training.

At one time I was an aerial machine gunner by trade and training!
> -----------------------------------
But, On this topic,

We have a "baloney" lunch meat, which was, presumably by inspiration
born as a relative of a type of "sausage"in Italy that is there
called "mortadella" (sometimes with the added lable "di Bologna"
i. e. from Bologna. That "lunch meat" is not quite like ours.
Specifically it is larger by a least a quarter in diameter. Also
a slice of it will have several squarish white parts, a little
over a centimeter across, that look like fat. As you buy some
slices of this, the proprieter of the salumeria will lean toward
you and in a conspirator's voice tell you, "E fatto di carne di
cavallo": then admit that this is a joke. But the rumor is
general in Italy. The word "mortad-ello (I hyphenate to show the
base stem and the suffix) is based on the Latin (participial)
adjective "myrtatus" or "murtatus" meaning prepared with myrtle.
The Latin form shows by its spelling with y that it was derived from
a Greek term, and by its pronunciation with /u/ that it was an
early borrowing (later Greek borrowings have /i/ for this
vowel. The Latin form with /d/ shows it was a northern Italianb
form, or rather not a southern one. I had never thought to comnect
it, however, with Lombardy, since its traditionally associated
witn Bologna, which is in Emilia.

Ain't you sorry you asked me to put on my philologists funny hat?

And Jansy went on to say,

> John, I cannot understand "repos" as "hope".

Actually what I was trying (ineptly it seema) was to show that one
anagram (a word game that Nabokov waw fond of that consists of
rearranging the letters of a word or name) places those letters
in the form "spero", which is a latin word meaning "hope" as
in the French result "espoir".

How did you reach this link?
> In Brazil we name " arquivo morto" ( "dead file" ?) what is filed away after
a
> case is closed.
> A "repos file" could either mean " not yet dead" or "resting" either as in "
I
> rest my case" or as " here lie the ashes of"...
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ED: Mortadella, according to my Portuguese dictionary, comes from the
> Latin: "murta", myrtle? ( "mit Myrthen und Rosen"... ) which were
> the leaves added for the preservation of meat ( either pork or beef ).
>
>

----- End forwarded message -----