AS: Cat-a-mite might just point to PF’s queer common-tater. Tater is slang for potato = Rabelais’s peut-e^tre. The poet’s anagram Ali Sabre leads us inexorably to the Cru-Sade, literally a ViNtage cruel monster. Who else but VlaDEEMir* Nabokov, the irreDEEMable imPALEr?
* VN’s own playful pronuciation guide: “rhymes with Redeemer.” (quoted in VN’s NY Times obituary)
PS: the Greek prep kata- (cata-) has dozens of helpful meanings and has spawned thousands of words in many languages. allusional potential is hugely inviting. À la Chasse!
PPS: Your ‘correction’ is useful but not essential: the dative can be described as a ‘prepositional’ case in many languages, inc. German.
Skb
On 04/04/2009 20:13, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
from Alexey Sklyarenko:
Kot or, Zemblan for "what is the time" (see Kinbote's note to l. 149), is clearly a play on the Russian phrase kotoryi chas ("what is the time"). While Zemblan word for "hour" appears to be a homograph of both the English conjunction "or" and the French word for "gold", kot (apparently, Zemblan for "which" or "what") is Russian for "he-cat". Can there be a connection to the cat that Kinbote inherited with the house from his landlord, judge Goldsworth, and to Hodge, Samuel Johnson's cat mentioned in the epigraph to the novel?
Btw., note that there is cat (as well as du, German for "you") in "ducat", the gold piece that the grateful King leaves on the mantlepiece in the mountain-side house where he spent the night following his escape from the palace. One remembers that the King Louis XVI (whose escape to Varennes is mentioned in Speak, Memory, Chapter Three, 1) was recognized because his profile was on every French golden coin, louis[d'or], and wonders if there is on the ducat the King's profile? However that may be, Karl the Beloved is not recognized by his hosts, despite even the fact that there stands on the same mantlepiece an old color print representing him as a young man with his young wife.
I don't know if this is of any importance, but kot = kto (who) = tok (current), kot + or = otrok (boy) = rokot (roar, rumble) = rotok (little mouth).
a correction re Graden (in one of my previous posts): "prepositional case" (that doesn't exist in German) should be "Dative plural".