Okay so I’ve been identifying for almost a year now, and I always learn the scientific names. Every species I know how to identify, I know the scientific name. BUT… I have no idea how to pronounce them! I would hate to be talking with someone and totally butcher a binomial name like that. I’m hones…

Have to use scientific Esperanto, for those foreigners :laughing:

[image] benkendrick: Phonetically correct is generally all people ask for. Even that can be open to question. The phenomenon of Batesian mimicry is named after Henry Bates, so that means that it is pronounced “BATES-i-an.” But based on the spelling alone, it would seem to phonetically rhyme w…

One of my first research jobs was studying Florida Scrub-jays, in the genus Aphelocoma. I worked for two experts on this species, who had studied it together for decades, and they pronounced the genus entirely differently from each other. Eventually I asked about this and was told, “It is a dead lan…

If I think about this topic of pronunciation for too long, “I feel a coma”coming on … which is how I remember Aphelocoma.

As someone who is self taught in just about everything, I mangle scientific names all the time. The best advice I ever got was “The correct way to pronounce scientific names is to say them loudly and with confidence, then just don’t worry about it.”

[image] sedgequeen: Callitriche I tried Google Translate on this one and it pronounced the word just as you described it, i.e., Call IT tricky. Although GT usually mangles Thai sentence translations, I frequently use it for pronouncing Thai words. For Latin, I set the from language to Latin, …

I took Latin I in high school. That is EXACTLY what the teacher said.

Long ago when I studied Latin at school our teacher, a Cambridge classisist, was very insistent that ALL consonants are ‘hard’ (always pronounce c as k) and only barbarians from Oxford would ever consider softening them (sometimes pronouncing c as s).

There is some “guidance” like pronouncing proper nouns as in their parent tongue (e.g. Douglasia or mexicana) but I have been to international conferences with world-reknowned taxonomists from many nations, and they show absolutely no agreements in pronunciation. Often they have to spell it out. So,…

Where Do I Start With Pronouncing Scientific Names?

Nature Talk

goldfjnch June 26, 2022, 2:53pm 73

I came here to say this.
The purpose of scientific names is to be understood without ambiguity, so as long as you’re achieving this your pronunciation is “correct” in my opinion.

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Where Do I Start With Pronouncing Scientific Names?

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