Is there any kind of user-friendly guide to pronouncing and understanding Latin names of critters? It’s always been such a mystery to me even though I can kind of suss out the meanings (rarely). Or is it something that’s just passed down orally from teacher to student?

At least from how it’s been discussed on the forum, pronounce them with confidence and your peers will hopefully understand? Where Do I Start With Pronouncing Scientific Names? For plants, specifically, these two are good resources, the second is especially helpful for decoding what they mean: H…

[image] phma: The modern Romans, or the ancient Romans? Neither - the proverb simply advises following (or at least attempting to approximate) the local customs. Depending on the native language of the speaker, some phonemes may be very hard to distinguish or articulate, so it would be poor e…

However, we have descriptions of the pronunciation by ancient grammarians and we also have scientific reconstruction. There is quite a lot of knowledge out there, for example in the classical books by Allen, Vox Graeca and Vox Latina https://archive.org/details/allen-vox-graeca-the-pronunciation-of-…

The pronunciation of Greek-derived words and morphemes in scientific Neo-Latin is mostly based by the pronunciation of Ancient Greek, and how it was reflected in Classical Latin way of writing of Greek. Modern Dimotiki pronunciation can be very different.

See etymologies in: https://www.odonatacentral.org/public/media/uploads/files/NA_Odonata_Checklist_2021_update.pdf Tramea and Tholymis came to mind.

In this case I tend to assume that the vowels are short, except for certain morphemes that have long vowels (e.g. -on has long ‘o’ if it’s masculine or feminine, but short if neuter).

The two genera I mentioned were examples of names that seem to have no meaning in Latin or Ancient Greek according to the checklist I linked to. But they are still fine as scientific names.

Usually Spanish and Italian have the same syllable stressed as Latin; for example, “apio” and Apium are both stressed on the first syllable. But there are exceptions: the genus Tabānus, stressed on the second syllable because of the long vowel, is “tábano” in Spanish. Italian “tafano”, though, follo…

The way i see it, the ancient latin speakers often corrupted Greek, who couldn’t agree anyway hence multiple versions of Ancient Greek, then over hundred of years “latin” varied both regionally and temporary, then followed by massive regional diversification. From that chaos modern French developed …

I would agree with ljodwalis that the variation in pronunciation often comes on how we accent the syllables. In learning bacterial and parasitic names many years ago in veterinary college, I was taught that the accents generally fell on the penultimate syllable. However, in listening to pronunciat…

Thank you everyone, for a very interesting discussion! I’m always blown away by the depth and breadth of people’s knowledge about seemingly arcane subjects. It’s why the Forum threads fascinate and educate me. So, I’ll forge ahead with my own, personal versions of scientific names and stop worrying …

Latin names -- a pronunciation and definition guide?

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Latin names -- a pronunciation and definition guide?

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