----- Original Message -----
From: Jamie L. Olson
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: Lolita and Ada pronunciations English & Russian

Sergey Karpukhin is right both in his noticing that Americans might tend to pronounce this second title character's name as "AY-da" instead of "AH-da", and in his assertion that the pun is lost unless we say "AH-da."  (Pardon my VN-like phonetic descriptions, which are much less precise than Karpukhin's more professional linguistic ones.)  The pun, of course, is that in New England dialects of American English those 'R's in "Ardor" are attenuated, if not absent entirely, so that the word 'ardor' also ends up sounding like "AH-da."  I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere, perhaps in Boyd's annotations to the novel.

Jamie L. Olson

At 11:42 AM 08/11/2003 -0700, you wrote:

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Sergey Karpukhin
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 11:13 AM

Dear Carolyn Kunin,

I'd like to add that in the novel "Lolita" the diminutives of Dolores are Lolita and Lola and Lo, but Charlotte is shortened to Lotte (Part 1, Chapter 18).
The name which I think must be pronounced à la Russe in VN is Ada, because if we pronounce it in the American way (or as the English Pronouncing Dictionary of Daniel Jones [15th edition, 1997] suggests) we shall lose the pun in the title: Ada, or Ardor. A Russian would say /'a:dÉ™/, while an American I once heard said /'eidÉ™/. 
 
Respectfully,
Sergey
www.the-nr.irk.ru