English Consulting

O.K., unfortunately I've never read _Lolita_ (I tend to shy away anything even slightly pornographic, cross my heart), so knowing the context of that quotation would really have helped to make sense of the sentence, but I'll try anyway. First off, the heart of the sentence, the verb phrase contains the main verb "would have . . . withered" which is an example of the English construction consisting of "would" plus "have" plus the past participle form of a verb, used to indicate that the action or state denoted by the verb did *not* take place in reality at some time in past; instead, the emphasis is on the hypothetical situation where the action/state of the verb *did* happen or *was* true. In other words, to say the blossom would have withered means the blossom actually didn't wither.

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But the presence of the adverb "scarcely" in this verb phrase really throws a monkey wrench into the interpretation of the whole sentence (sorry, "throw a monkey wrench into" is one of my favorite English idioms; it just means that it complicates matters). That is, "scarcely" is similar in meaning and usage to "hardly," i.e., it's almost the equivalent of flat-out negating the verb and the sentence. To illustrate: in a sentence "The blossom scarcely withers," the meaning is that there is very little withering, and the emphasis is really on the fact that it doesn't wither much. If we introduce the modal "would" to add a contrary-to-fact or hypothetical meaning, we get "The blossom would scarcely wither" (as is typical, the adverb "scarcely" is inserted between the first auxiliary "would" and the main verb "wither"), which now conveys the meaning that the blossom really does wither but in a certain (hypothetical) circumstance the withering is "scarce." And finally, if the reference is to past time we get the "have" plus participle construction "The blossom would scarcely have withered," whose meaning is that the blossom withered but in the right circumstances or conditions--which again are not spelled out in the quotation you gave but I suspect would be evident in the context--the withering was minimal or close to non-existent.

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So I suspect that the overall meaning of the passage you cite is that there was a grave with an orange blossom growing or placed on it that withered, but this sentence introduces the speculation about the relative lacking of withering of the blossom given whatever unreal past circumstance is also being discussed in the context.

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One's "first language," "native language" or "L1" is the language that a human learns during early childhood primarily in the home environment, i.e., by living and interacting with parents, siblings and relatives, and to a lesser but important extent the immediately surrounding community. The learning is natural in the sense that all human beings are believed to be endowed with an inborn facility for acquiring a first language during this stage of life.

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By definition, a second language, a.k.a. a "foreign" language or "L2," is learned subsequent to the first or native language but may be acquired at any stage of life, even roughly simultaneous to the acquisition of the native language, a process which often leads to much greater fluency with the second language. Generally the methods by which a second language is acquired, and even the precise definition of that phenomenon is still subject to debate, vary greatly, ranging from traditional, classroom-based "book learning" which features a strong emphasis on the written language and the study of formal rules of grammar and constant comparison between the first language and the language to be learned--often referred to as the "target" language--to a process quite reminiscent of first-language acquisition in which the learner is exposed to or "immersed" in a social environment featuring the total or near-total exclusive use of the target language which is acquired, at varying rates, in the course of fully engaging cognitively and socially in the second-language community, often as a matter of simple survival.

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