EDNote: черёмуха
CAN
WE SEE CHEREMUHA in Cyrillics? Is the H a “soft G” as in Gamlet or a Xh
as in Xhosa!? Where’s the stress? On the ‘em’ I would hope/guess.
HATE to criticize your krasivi yazik, tavarich Victor! BUT having to
BLEND prepositions like V into CHeremuhE and inflect the noun is NOT
WHAT the GODDESS Lingua INTENDED!!!
Small world, Victor. In my ACM col mentioned in prev email, I found
“links” in Pale Fire to leading computer science topics (Trees and
Branches) After quoting the “L’if ... Grand potato” STANza:
To quickly note the puns and allusions: L’if is French for the Yew
tree, of ancient Celtic significance for both death and long-life
(which just shows how usefully flexible mythology can be); L’if can
also be read as “the IF,” well-known to programmers who need to branch
(trees again) conditionally to remote parts of the coding forest. To
play the allusion game you must be bold enough to spot that we have
been “Learning tree languages from positive examples and membership
queries.” This also happens to be the title of a famous paper on
Algorithmic Learning Theory by Jérôme Besombesa and Jean-Yves Marion,
in Theoretical Computer Science,
Vol. 382, Issue 3, dated 6 September, 2004, the very week I moved back
to England from the USA. Spooky beyond mere coincidence. We Nabokovians
are obsessed by, and have a rare pet name for, spooky dates: fatidic.
Look it up before ... Rabelais we’ve already met with his big
peut-étre/potato, perhaps the biggest “maybe” we mortals face. Nabokov
loved, analyzed and lectured on James Joyce’s Ulysses but couldn’t
stand Finnegans Wake (far too cryptic). Perhaps there’s a clue here, an
echo of the Big Potato Famine that devastated Ireland in the
1840s. There they sang “Oh the praties they are small and we
dig them in the Fall, and we eat them roots and all, Over here.”