On 03/03/2008 08:34, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
John Rea wrote: I have said elsewhere that our author treats language as a game with secret rules: and on top of that he cheats... Thus, the word "fiume" is the basic italian word for "river". This is what makes the consenting reader equate it in meaning with Spanish "rio": and he will have quickly followed this line of logic by associating "alto" = "tall"... This leads the reader quickly to associaate, "rio grande" with "ri'alto", incorporating the [fi] of "fiume' in this fluminous and fulminous brew. These word associations are at the basis of a game called by linguists,"folk etymology" ... If my words perish on line, please send a copy to ...any Dutch Brazilians, an ethnic group with which I claim an affiliation based on a German preacher who ended up in Flatbush.
JM: John Rea forgot to add Yalta to the full fulminous fluminous flight that took-off from Fialta to end up in Rio Grande ( with its northern flock of foreign preachers). In short, fiumi (river in Italian) is unrelated to Fiume, Yalta and Fialta to every (unconsenting) reader. So much for the tin-foil and shimmer... Btw, I read that the yellow car that crashed against a circus-truck in VN's novel was named "Icarus" only in its English translation (Tammi's "Problems of Nabokov's poetics" has yet to be consulted) - so it is as fictional as the city of Fialta and the novels in which it appears. Do I digress?
May a poor but honest lexicographer have the last word:
Zzzzzzzz!: a state of abulia induced by excessive wordplay in one particular untypical language family (Indo-European). "Look after the ponce and the puns will look after themselves" [generated automatically by the LEXicon Mk I].
All human speakers treat "NL (Natural Language) as a [performance] game with secret [hidden] rules." They have no choice, doing what comes naturally. It goes with the HomSap pre-wired (but plastic beyond the mapping) territory.
VN's teasing playfulness with words does cross breathtaking borders (but stopping short at the "incoherent midden heaps of Dublin"), yet his greatness as a writer surely transcends this transient "icing on the cake." His sublimely inventive, richly detailed characters, plots, and (dare we say it?) socio-political insights are available in all languages for all generations. That is to say, the important, Universal bits are translatable! Preferably, each age will receive fresh translations since natural languages are forever on the move semantically, and more slowly, grammatically. As Kuhn's bumper sticker proclaims: Shifts Happen!
VN's target audience of careful re-readers, regardless of their "native" tongues, will forever welcome the scholarly footnotes, at least on the second or third readings (see e.g., Brian Boyd's AdaOnline advice, for which renewed thanks.) Yet there is, undoubtedly, that special "elitist" frisson when we decode the cunningly-layered pun or toponymical allusion unaided. And no mortal sin if we occasionally read more into a phrase than the Master consciously intended (whatever that means). Indeed, VN was highly tickled by some of the more "imaginative" interpretations.
It is important, especially for LitCrits, to see NL as an evolving, primarily spoken "organism," more than as a set of bound, written dictionaries with "meanings" listed 1, 2, 3 ... with "parts of speech" and, if lucky, suggested "origins," and authoritarian citations of previous usage. John Rea mentions "folk" etymologies, but most etymologies are what Prof. John McWhorter [quod google] calls "Just So stories." Transmitted speech, errors and just plain phonetic mutations, transforms the eventual written forms of words out of all rationally-predictable recognition. Which is why, to cite a well-known example, "wheel" and "cycle" share the same Indo-European root.
Puns are more often based on accidental, superficial convergences than on any real linguistic or semantic fellowship. To mention briefly John's risible jump from DN's mot juste "speck" to Laural "spec[k]ulation," one can (yawn) trace in detail their diverse roots via "sprinkle" (where did that rGo?) or, unrelatedly as far as anyone can tell, the hundreds of "spec-" words based on the Latin for looking, mirrors, watchtowers etc. To a Scouse, a "good speck" is indeed a vantage point at the football match, proving again how arbitrary puns can be, given each reader's distinct lexis.
Stan Kelly-Bootle