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.
I love this post!
It shows to me as “barbarian” (germanic language family) native speaker the situation at its best! I suffered from 4 years latin and 7 years french lessons in scool and was told that there is no right or wrong pronounciation for a dead language. Italians may see this different, Spanish and Romanians maybe too and they even seem to be able to understand each other language somehow still today. They have the strongest heritage in old latins still. Having learned now how different the pronounciation in english can be (sorry, but i still sometimes struggle to understand some franco-canadian, newzealandish or some southern english pronounciation) i seriously doubt that romano-british and romano-syrian ever shared much comparable pronounciation even in ancient times.
Speak latins as if you would speak english in NewYork. It will be OK.
Here are some names that could be pronounced either way:
mocinno /mo’siɲo/ or /mo’kinno/. The specific epithet of the resplendent quetzal is a Spanish surname, Mociño, Spanish <ñ> often comes from Latin , as in annus>año.
Magnolia: the could be /ɲ/ (as in French), /ŋn/ (as in Classical Latin), or /gn/.
Tylopoda /ty’lopoda/ or /ty:'lopoda/. The first part is Greek τύλη (callus or hump), whose first vowel was long or short.
Thank you for the link to the earlier thread. The search bar didn’t bring it up and I see that I’ve asked the same question.
Moderators, do you want to close this thread and redirect to the old one?
The root of the name Notobubon reflects the fact that many of the species of this genus were once part of the genus Bubon L. (see e.g. Sonder 1862).The Greek prefix “noto” means southern and alludes to the genus’s southern African origin (Magee et al. 2009).
Thanks! As far as I can tell, with macrons it’s *Notobūbon", where the first ‘o’ is short because it means “south”, the ‘u’ is long because it’s from Greek “βουβων” (swelling) referring to the blisters induced by the plant’s juice, and the last ‘o’ is short because it’s neuter. But I’m not sure whether it’s third-declension (genitive Notobubonis or Notobubontis) or second-declension (genitive Notobubi).
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 etiquette to insist on a particular pronounciation.
That said, I do not usually even try to use pure reconstructed Latin pronunciation. The names and various terms are Neo-Latin anyway. I just try to use the regional pronunciation that is relevant here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_regional_pronunciation maybe with some features of the reconstructed pronunciation, given the fact that I am affected by learning the Latin language as well.
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.
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, follows the Latin.
French is not a good guide to Latin stress. Once I was out fishing/camping with a church group, saw a dragonfly, and remarked “Libelula”, putting the stress on “lu” where it is in French. The pastor’s wife snapped “Libélula”. The stress is the same in Latin and Spanish.
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 which then amusingly tried standardise their mess and almost made themselves the lingua franca of science and beyond (which i just mention as digression inline with the previous comment). Thankfully for taxonomy, Linnaeus ignored the massive French influence of his time, and mostly opted for “latin” on his reformed names for cataloging living things, as a supposedly universal language so that diverse people could agree on which taxon they were discussing. However, there’s nothing historically to my knowledge about which version of “latin” was favoured in any early works, especially for pronunciation. Plenty of Greek or other languages were also being used right from the start. I recently learnt some of Linnaeus’s early bird taxa are simply formed by combining Greek and Latin words, e.g. the first as the genus name, the second as the species name. In cases like that, should his Greek-based genus have the Greek pronunciation, but the Latin-based species have the latin pronunciation? If so, which variant of the Greek, and which variant of the Latin? Point is, don’t worry on it. Just find a way of communicating your intent. However, beware, there’s people like me who then listen to the modern anglicised version and then just for fun throw in a likely myopic view of what various ancients might have done based on some interpretation of modern scholars. I’d love to hear the views of the ancients in such cases!
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 pronunciations of Cerastium arvense (and other botanical) on the website https://www.howtopronounce.com/cerastium-arvense you can hear many variations of accenting the antepenultimate or the penultimate syllable. I guess I will generally (but not always) stick with accenting the penultimate out of lessons learned long ago.
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 if they’re correct. And some of you provided references that I’ll peruse over the coming winter when I’m stuck inside.
There’s a North American wildflower named Castilleja (Indian Paintbrush). I pronounce it Kastill-ay-ha because I thought it was Spanish. Others say Kastill-ee-ja. Any thoughts on that?
It’s named for Domingo Castillejo, so pronouncing it as Spanish is correct. Spanish is descended from Latin, so pronouncing it as Latin is also correct. (“Silla” is from Latin “sella”, and the pronunciation of ⟨ll⟩ changed the same way.) Stress is on the penult, so the ⟨e⟩ is long /e:/ when pronouncing as Latin (and is fine when pronouncing as Spanish too).
Either ⟨ll⟩ is /j/ or /ʝ/ or /ʎ/, however you pronounce Spanish ⟨ll⟩, and ⟨j⟩ is /x/, or ⟨ll⟩ is /l:/ and ⟨j⟩ is /j/ (not /d͡ʒ/, that’s English ⟨j⟩).
