JA: Actually I wasn't talking about the L or the T in
the name, but the O sound, which Nabokov has indicated should be pronounced with
a short "ah" and not a long "oh", which my friend told me is in fact pronounced
"oh" in Spanish, i.e.: not "Lahlihta" but more like "Lohlihta",
forgive my phonetic rendering.
JM: The "Lahlihta" results from
VN's rendition of his reciting Lolita in Russian. Perhaps the
"ah" is similar to Marina's pronunciation of "Ada"?
Below, two curious passages.
PNIN: "The organs concerned in the production of English
speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue {that punchinello
in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its
over-energetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in
class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian
was music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty ('dzeefeecooltsee'
in Pninian English) with depalatization, never managing to remove the extra
Russian moisture from t's and d's before the vowels
he so quaintly softened. His explosive 'hat' ('I never go in a hat even in
winter') differed from the common American pronunciation of 'hot' (typical of
Waindell townspeople, for example) only by its briefer duration, and thus
sounded very much like the German verb hat (has). Long o's
with him inevitably became short ones: his 'no' sounded positively Italian,
and this was accentuated by his trick of triplicating the simple negative ('May
I give you a lift, Mr Pnin?' 'No-no-no, I have only two paces from here'). He
did not possess (nor was he aware of this lack) any long oo: all he could
muster when called upon to utter 'noon' was the lax vowel of the German 'nun'
"
VN on E. Wilson: "Upon being challenged to read Evgeniy Onegin aloud,
[Wilson] started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word, and
turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic
anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather
endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in
stitches." And there's the scholarly assault, raining down upon Wilson's head
like lethal ordnance. There couldn't have been much left afterwards: a smoking
crater, some cuff links, a pair of
glasses."