I forget the history behind the -ii versus -i masculine possessive ending, although both remain in use depending on the original description of the taxon. Most of the time I just remember which epithets have one and which have two but have to check references occasionally to be sure. Kind of a pain, which is probably why I don’t pronounce the -ii as I should.
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To some degree, scientific names remind me of barcodes… they let you “bin” a taxon nicely and neatly, but they’re (unfortunately?) just mnemonic enough and sound enough like any language that some of them are memorable. I still think functionally, they’re no different than a barcode: they exist primarily to identify one thing out of many confusing and conflicting common names.
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Fairy shrimp in UK means Chirocephalus diaphanus, so Anostraca, not Amphipoda.
As for pronunciation, just say it with confidence and let the other person think “Oh, I’ve been saying that wrong for years”.
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I’m glad Linnaeus didn’t think in terms of numbers or alphanumerics in assigning unique names. That would’ve been an ugly taxonomy.
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That be Carl von Linné, until they Latinised him.
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I thought he Latinized himself.
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Lol not those. Detailing; he said “cave shrimp, like fairy shrimp. Cave fairy shrimp”.
Def amphipods, ex Niphargus glenniei. Look up research by Lee Knight. I confirmed it during the trip with him and my friend colleague who finally translated the confusion. Actual shrimp, cave adapted, are not a thing in the UK so it causes no confusion to use that colloquialism
See, common name being so confusing it confused you too xD but its good to know it means yet another thing too!!
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Have to use scientific Esperanto, for those foreigners 
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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 with artesian – as in “ba-TEE-sian.”
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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 language, who cares?”
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If I think about this topic of pronunciation for too long, “I feel a coma”coming on … which is how I remember Aphelocoma.
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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.”
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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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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, paste in the word, and then press the little speaker button at the bottom of the text box.
Your mileage may vary but it generally works well enough for me. And it’s very convenient.
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I took Latin I in high school. That is EXACTLY what the teacher said.
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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).
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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, don’t worry.
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The whole subject of correct pronunciation of scientific names is starting to remind me a bit of the Birthday Paradox where the more people you get into a room, the more likely two of them are to have the same birthday at a surprisingly low number of people.
Except it’s the opposite! The more people you get into a room who use scientific names to describe things, the less likely they are to agree on how something is pronounced.
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I studied the scientific names of higher fungi for a few months before finally meeting other fungiphiles on a foray. Was interesting hearing how the others pronounced the names. For example, the genus of bitter boletes, Tilopilus, they said as tie-LAHP-olis, rather than my tie-low-PILL-is. I generally stress the second to last syllable, because i remember that from a Latin lesson, but then when I hear others I’m easily swayed. After all that’s how we are able to communicate at all.
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I also usually follow your preferred pronunciation emphasis for four-syllable names. But some do it differently.
I’ve heard from mammalogists various ways to say Dipodomys (kangaroo rats):
Dip-oh-DOH-meez
Die-POD-oh-meez
Dih-PODE-oh-meez
Etc.
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