To: carranza2 who wrote (13149 ) 12/30/2006 9:20:55 PM From: Wyätt Gwyön Read Replies (1) | Respond to thought Speak Memory was a novel? where did you see that? [edit: duh, in the quote i put to you previously, but i don't think he really believes it...] here he calls it an autobiography (see bold):Majorat: The OED draft entry from 2000 defines it as "In France, Spain, Italy, and some other countries: an entailment of an estate by primogeniture; an estate attached to the right of primogeniture" and gives the following etymology: that most wonderful of autobiographies, Nabokov's Speak, Memory : "The eldest was Dmitri, who inherited the Nabokov majorat in the then Tsardom of Poland." The question is, how would Vladimir Vladimirovich, that searcher-out and cherisher of obscure words, have pronounced it? The sentence in question is not in the earlier Russian version, Drugie berega, but the latter contains the phrase (near the start of the second paragraph of Chapter Three, Section 1) ????? ?????? ? ??????????? ???? [pósle oblávy v mayorátskom ború] 'after a battue in a pine forest inherited by majorat' (a description that has vanished in the later work, since in the interim he had discovered that the heraldic bears that had inspired it were in fact lions—"brownish and, perhaps, overshaggy beasts, but not really ursine"), so he knew the Russian version of the word (cited in the new OED etymology, perhaps on account of the newly added Nabokov quote), but surely he would not have been tempted to pronounce the English word mahyoh-RAHT, despite the fact that that is an accurate reflection of the identically spelled German word that may be the source of both the Russian and English ones. No, he would have taken pains to use the "correct" English pronunciation... but which? Since the word has never, apparently, been a natural, mother's-knee part of anyone's vocabulary, he would have consulted the only dictionary to contain it, the OED (first edition), and thus have given it the benefit of his fluent French. I just wish there existed an audio version of the book as read by its exquisitely multilingual author.languagehat.com
