Latin names -- a pronunciation and definition guide?

Especially if your native language is not Latin :joy:

I once listened to two colleagues debating for ages whether Senecio should be pronounced Seh.nee.seeo or Seh.nee.keeo. I laughed after a while and they both got offended when I said I didn’t care which they picked, but that a Latin speaker never would have pronounced the letter e as i (English ee), so did it matter which flavour of wrong you pick, all of us were trying to pronounce Latin vowels using modern English pronunciations… (So Seh.neh.sio or Seh.neh.kio instead).

I tend to put a Spanish accent on my Latin, because that’s my heritage and it sounds totally different than my English- or German-speaking colleagues, but the point is to understand each other, not to outdo each other on pedantry in correctly pronouncing a language that has been dead for Centuries.