Sublime Weill/Gershwin! Well-spotted, Barry. Well-missed, Carolyn?
I would add, forcibly, that we really must end this dated nonsense that [name-your-pet-language] is particularly (nay, uniquely) blessed with ‘elegance’ or ‘expressiveness’ or [name-your-pet-predicate]. This myth owes much to [Sir] William Jones (18th century pioneer philologist, prime mover in the Indo-European family hypothesis, quid googlet).
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either ... “
Equally daft and discredited is the claim that, say, Russian grammar, is exceptionally complex and challenging. In truth, ALL natural languages (we include creoles but exclude pidgins) are equally difficult, and at the same time, equally simple (in that children worldwide acquire their ‘mother-tongue’ equally painlessly and at approximately the same speed [see Chomsky et al]).
Having ‘mastered’ our ‘native’ language ‘effortlessly’ without reciting grammar-book paradigms, or struggling through lists of ‘exceptions,’ we wrongly fancy that the second language we tackle as adults has been devised by some devil-linguist determined to drive us mad. Just one example: Anglophones may faint when faced with all those Russian noun declensions, although these are no worse than Latin and much simpler than Basque. What English has ‘gained’ by losing inflections is more than made up by the incredible complexity of English prepositions. Native speakers, of course, are usually blind/deaf to the subtleties/quirks of their own grammars. I’ve even heard it said: “Thank God, English has NO GRAMMAR!” Try reading R Quirk [sic] for instant disillusionment. And can I here make a plea for a DESCRIPTIONIST approach to language & its usage? There’s an antiquated PRESCRIPTIONIST tendency with many on this List (“should La Fontaine be Lafontaine?”) , reflecting what I consider to be a humourless misreading of Nabokov’s oft conflicting, changing and ever-teasing opinions. That’s a penalty paid by all aphorists: brevity is the soul of wit but the bowels of ambiguity © skb. And it helps, I think, to answer CK’s strange criticism of VN’s English fluency. VN the aphorist preferred to pre-prepare his answers to pre-submitted interviewers’ questions. Thousands of lecture students and visiting scholars (not to mention Dmitri) can attest to VN’s off-the-cuff spontaneous wit in perfectly ‘native’ English (howbeit with some residual Russian intonations).
Summary: there’s a sortof trade-off between the grammatical areas of complexity/simplicity found in the world’s 6000 extant languages. You can range from 17 genders to none; three colour-words to three-hundred; no number-words (rare) to an infinity; Austronesian languages with just three verbs; Amerindian languages with sixteen words for “we”; separate male and female versions of the “same” language; complex, life-threatening Honorifics; and so on. Yet in ALL these tongues, one can convey the fact that “My parents were poor but honest” (Russell’s famous test) and explain WHY Onegin flirted with Olga at the ball, and deliberately shot first in order to kill Lensky!! Narrational efficiency will vary! (European translators will find it easier to explicate Pushkin’s social structures than Papuan or Cherokee.) Ah-BUT, I hear you cry, ONLY Pushkin’s Russian can REALLY convey Evgeni’s motives. Non-Russians will NEVER EVER ... (continued page 84). It’s therefore quite surprising to read in Edmund Wilson’s infamous review (NYRB, Vol 2 Number 2, Aug 26, 1965) of Nabokov’s “serious failure” in “miss[ing] a fundamental point in the central situation [that is, EO’s behaviour leading up to the duel - skb] ... Nabokov says that the latter act is ‘quite out of character.’ He does not seem to be aware that Onegin, among his other qualities, is, in his translator’s favorite one-syllable adjective, decidedly $$$ [alas, my print-out loses the Cyrillics - skb] - that is to say, nasty, méchant.”
Phonetically, too, we err in assigning to selected natural languages particularly “euphonious” or “semantically significant” ranges of sounds. The former is eminently subjective; the latter is problematical in “modern” i.e., old-fashioned Saussurian linguistical terms. Both have been debated on our V-list with a depressing lack of comprehension. Am I flogging a DEAD NAGGY? (I use VN’s controversial rendering of Pushkin’s ego loshadka as “his naggy.” Wilson prefers “his poor horse” which doesn’t quite sound adequate. My infallible Brituition is “his POOR OLD NAG.” This may appear tautological, since nags are usually poor and old horses, but the collocation is AS HEARD in spoken English, STRAIGHT from the HORSE’S MOUTH, and matches the spirit of the Russian diminutive. “Naggy” seems a forced, dictionary-only diminutive to my ears.)
Meanwhile, I admit to being thrilled, and siding with Jansy’s word-mysticism, when I find Nabokov extolling
“The Russian word [for the Padus racemosa] with its fluffy and dreamy syllables, admirably suits this beautiful tree ...”
BUT Is that lingering Lolita as prETTY as bETTY? You bet! I ask because I’ve just stumbled on a battered copy of Punch (Or the London Charivari) dated July 28, 1919. VN might well have seen it? The cartoon shows a rotund, jolly WW1 Major chatting up a remarkably Nabokovian Nymphet (short skirt, black stockings, shoulder-length hair, angelic-evil profile, provocative posture):
Major: “And so you’re TWELVE, are you BETTY? Really, I wouldn’t have thought so.”
BETTY: “Oh, Major, you FLATTER me!”
I expect another “Huh” from CK! And I must agree that tastes in humour shift. Many Punch cartoons in 1919 portray subtle social comedy situations as well as outright giggles.
What is true is that, quite accidentally, some language sound-sytems offer more rhyming and alliterative opportunities than others. Think of the thousands of EASY rhymes in Dante’s Commedia and Pushkin’s EO. Much depends on where inflections and sound-mutations come in words (front, end, or middle!) Some languages have 80+ consonants including throat-killing clicks but few vowels; others like Cantonese and Mandarin have quite a limited range of syllables but need complex tones for disambiguation. As explored deeply by VN in his EO commentaries, the different stress patterns in English and Russian greatly influence the prosodial possibilities. BTW: Russian Prosody was another area where Wilson and VN disagreed quite rudely.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 02/03/2009 02:29, "Barry Warren" <barrywarren94703@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
Carolyn Kunin, I'm not sure what you're up with the the so-called famous Ode to Roman Jakobson that you quote. This is obviously a parodic alteration of the final stanza of "The Saga of Jenny," words by Ira Gershwin, music by Kurt Weill, from the 1941 musical "Lady in the Dark." Below is the final stanza of that song's clever lyrics.
Submitted by list member Barry Warren
"Saga of Jenny" (final stanza):
Jenny made her mind up at seventy-five
She would live to be the oldest woman alive
But gin and rum and destiny play funny tricks,
And poor Jenny kicked the bucket at seventy-six
Jenny points a moral with which you cannot quarrel,
Makes a lot of common sense--
Jenny and her saga prove that you're gaga
If you don't keep sitting on the fence
Jenny and her story point the way to glory
To all man and womankind
Anyone with vision comes to this decision--
Don't make up your mind
--- On Sun, 3/1/09, Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
From: Carolyn Kunin <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET>
Subject: [NABOKV-L] perils of learning Russian
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Sunday, March 1, 2009, 7:16 AM
Yesterday Jansy wrote: You may weep for me - for all you care
So I won't cry for you, dear Nabokovian, the truth is I never should have.
But all seriousness aside, undertaking the learning of Russian is definitely not for everyone. There is even a famous Ode to Roman Jakobson that makes that very point. It ends thus:
Roman made his mind up at seventy-five
That he would live to be the oldest Slavist alive.
But analyzing grammar can play awfully mean tricks
And poor Roman gave up Russian at seventy-six.
Roman and his story
point the way to glory
for all man and womankind:
If you study Russian
It might lead to concussion
And you're bound to lose your mind.
Carolyn
* I believe the less famous poet's name is Richard von Echternach.