I took some pictures of a lizard, which several people identified as Anolis carolinensis. Then I looked up Anolis and found that it’s from an unidentified Caribbean language. That leaves me in doubt as to how to pronounce it. Are the A and o long or short, and therefore, which syllable has the accent?
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The correct pronunciation of the word “anole” is a matter of debate, but the most common pronunciations are “uh-nole” or “an-ole”. The etymologically correct pronunciation is probably “a-no-lee”. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary prefers “an-ole”, which is also common in the South.
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The most common pronunciation of the genus name among people who use it is:
A - nol - is
Uh - knoll - iss (like the end of “hiss”)
The most common pronunciation of Anole among scientists is just the first two syllables of the above, though as @Thunderhead notes, there are many variations.
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As with all scientific names, there is no one correct way to pronounce it. Pronunciations vary depending on the person’s native language and what is considered “standard” among their fellow researchers. However, there are lots of ways to mispronounce a scientific name if you add or subtract syllables. I recall someone pronouncing the fruit fly genus as “Drosophilia” — with an added syllable — which is just wrong.
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I’m asking about the genus name, and mainly whether o is long (in which case it’s stressed) or short (in which case A is stressed). I’m talking about the Latin pronunciation, not English or any other barbarian language. The i is short; -is is a common ending of nouns and adjectives in the nominative singular, while -īs is a dative/ablative plural ending of other nouns and adjectives.
Saludos from Mexico, where we say ah-NO-lees.
It may be that exact Latin pronunciations are best queried elsewhere, a language forum perhaps.
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Since Anolis is itself a barbarism, I’ll stick to the barbarian pronunciations myself. ;-)
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Okay, since Spanish usually* tracks the Latin stress, let’s go with /a’no:lis/.
*Exception: Latin tabānus, but Spanish tábano. Portuguese tavão has the expected stress.
I pronounce it ah-nol-ee.
however you want to as long as other people understand what you are trying to say, that’s the beauty of taxanomic latin
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In another thread I was just mentioning that my friend calls all anoles and geckos “iguanitos” which is hilariously wrong but I absolutely understand what she means since the other thing we have here are these (which, for more comedy, we do not call iguanas but rather tolocs).
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Since barbarians don’t speak Greek - that rules out Spanish too.
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Since taxonomic names are treated as Latin, Latin and its descendants, as well as Greek, are not considered barbarian. Though some descendants, particularly French, have diverged enough to sound barbarian to Latin speakers.
Pronounce it with confidence! Then everyone else will think they’re wrong.
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Who speaks Latin? Ecclesiastical Latin is a different language in turn.
To ancient Greeks our living languages are all barbarian.
And frankly since taxonomy uses a language invented for the purpose. Esperanto for biologists. Binomials which are sourced from both Ancient Greek and Latin are an abomination to linguists. Meet my twice golden daisy. The binomial is equivalent to a bar code or QR code or a running accession number - a label - which often means, not what it actually says but what we say it does. From Reunion or Madagascar? No, neither of them!
Pronunciation is an ivory tower debate. So long as the people you talk to understand you. Most of us are reading and writing the names, so we use the ‘Esperanto code’. (Whatever it is this week ;~)
It is important that people can find and search for the common name they use, in whatever living language.
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Technically scientific names are either Latin or latinized, and Latin does have its rules of pronunciation. But yeah I don’t think it really matters, unless you want to uselessly relearn every syllable you’ve ever heard lol (like the family ending -dae would be pronounced ‘dye’ not ‘day’ for example). At one point I told myself I was gonna look up correct latin accents and pronunciations and correctly pronounce every scientific name… lasted less than five minutes 
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;~) anything golden with chrys in the name, that is Greek.
Latin would be aurea
even the word taxonomy itself has a Greek root, as it consists of taxis ‘order’ and nomos ‘law’.
Ah, but it’s Latinized Greek!
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The author of my link is Greek, and he calls it Greek. I will take that.
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Exactly. The roots of anything with ‘ch’, ‘y’, ‘ph’, ‘x’ etc. are usually Greek, but scientific names are Latinized. That said it doesn’t really matter and as others have pointed out there are different form of Latin, people have different preferences etc.