I observed a Paulownia during CNC and wondered how to pronounce it. Wikipedia says /pɔːˈloʊniə/, but that’s an English pronunciation, which I consider invalid unless a scientific name is partly or wholly English, such as Winteraceae or Crash bandicoot, or is being used as a common name, such as geranium and nasturtium, both of which have circumscriptions different from the scientific names. The genus is named for Anna Pavlovna, so it’s from Russian. What do you think is the correct pronunciation?
I’d pronounce it the way it’s spelled and as an English speaker. Paul-own-ee-ah. Others may pronounce it differently which is fine as there is no universal standard pronunciation for any scientific name.
As a russian speaker, I recorded my pronunciation
https://voca.ro/1gCiKtg3nvl8
pahv-LOHV-nee-yah
[pɐvˈlovnʲɪjə]
I think that you should go with the flow. If you’re speaking English to other English speakers, you pronounce it as if it were an English word. Likewise, you pronounce it as a Russian word if you’re speaking Russian to Russians. If a conversation about Paulownia involves people from diverse countries, you can settle on one pronunciation for the purposes of that conversation, or each one can use his own version of the word because, regardless of pronunciation, everyone knows what plant is being referred to.
My favorite plant genus that is a Russian eponym is Krascheninnikovia. It’s possible I pronounce it the same as a Russian speaker would. But I often can’t remember how to spell it!
The scientific name is likely a Latin corruption of the original Russian Pavlovnia.
“U” or “W” does not exist in Classical Latin. All Us are replaced with Vs, but the “W” sound in English is not found in Latin.
I’ve always pronounced it Paul-low-knee-uh.
My guess is whoever translated the scientific name must have accidentally thought the "v"s in Pavlovnia were actually Latin "u"s and corrupted the name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Paulowna
There is a town in the Netherlands called Anna Paulowna.
The bigram “vn” is nonexistent in English and Latin. Only loanwords from Slavic languages like “hryvnia”(UKR money) and “tsarevna”(daughter of a tsar) contain that bigram. A scientific name may want to avoid a unknown bigram to many languages.
This is what I found:
The genus was renamed Pavlovnia by the German botanist Philip Franz Siebold after Princess Anna Pavlovna, the daughter of Tsar Paul I, who married into the Dutch royal family and later became Queen of the Netherlands. This was quickly converted into the Dutch rendering of Princess Anna’s name – Paulownia.
Exactly! Tsarevna Anna* was Russian, her patronym—derived from Pavel (or Paul)—was transliterated into the Dutch form upon her marriage, and so the genus name would properly follow the Dutch pronounciation: paul-OH-nee-uh. Conveniently for us Anglophones, that also works for English.
*(almost typed Tsaritsa, although she would’ve been that, too She certainly saw herself more as a Grand Duchess than an Dutch queen. 
)
I’m going with the Russian, though I think the last two letters should be pronounced in Latin, which doesn’t make much difference.
Looks as if she was Dutch by the time the Genus was named, and the naming was in honor of her position in Dutch society. Siebold, the botanist, would have used the Dutch or German pronunciation.
German pronunciation seems quite similar to Russian in this situation, doesn’t it? Any German speakers here? :)
Ja, aber es ist ein bisschen eingerostet*. Nobody to really practice with.
German changes the spelling a bit: the genus name is Paulownie (pau-lohv-knee; slightly more stress on the middle syllable). I really like the German common name for P. tormentosa: der Blauglockenbaum, or Foxglove Tree (literal translation: Bluebell tree).
*(Yeah, but it’s a little rusty.)
You are pronouncing ‘h’ and ‘k’, right?
No, I was going for a phonetic guide that minimized interpretation error. ‘Loh’ and ‘low’ are essentially equivalent as both phonemes and graphemes in English, but in German, the ‘o’ is slightly less long thanks to the following ‘w’. It’s not quite a schwa, but it’s a touch less broad and round.
I used the ‘knee’ as the grapheme rather than ‘nee’ because of the use of the French word née to indicate birth name. Not everyone remembers the diacritic, but the pronunciation as “nay” is pretty well known.
LEO.org has a wonderfully annotated page including audio files. Of course, the amusing part of all of this is that—99 times out of 100—a German speaker using the botanical name of the plant will just use the English pronunciation.
I used to pronounce it similar to your example. But I don’t know why. Given it’s Paul instead of Pavl the correct German pronunciation is [pau̯ˈlɔvni̯a] with the stress on „lown".