By tre pol and pen ye shall know Cornishmen.
A language in its own right. Now a dead one with Latin?
PS not dead after all!
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180412-the-rebirth-of-britains-lost-languages
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Only when you refer to them in the plural. Otherwise it’s a Dipodo-miss.
Edit: That was a joke.
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I wouldn’t worry about it too much. As has been mentioned before, even experts pronounce scientific names differently. Just pronounce it however sounds right to you.
I learned Latin in high school and Greek in college, so I’m authorized to tell you that you can pronounce scientific names literally however you want.
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What’s interesting about this is that “FEE-koos” is the correct (classical) Latin pronunciation :)
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How else would you pronounce Ficus? Is it said differently in English?
I’ve heard many people pronounce it with “fi” as in “fight” and “cus” as in “customer”.
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An, never heard anyone said it, here it’s exactly as Latin name, feekoos, so, easier to learn scientific name! :D
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Reminds me of https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/68049-Arctostaphylos-uva-ursi which is says “bear’s grapes” in Greek and then Latin. Tautonyms (species name same as ganus name) are forbidden in botany (unlike animal sciences) but there are ways around it apparently!
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That’s how I say it, mostly because (at least in the United States), if you say it properly as fikʊs (fee-koos), no one knows what you’re trying to say.
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I heard a discussion with three or four experts on fungi, and each person had their own pronunciation of that word.
FUN-guy
FUN-jee
FUN-ghee
FUN-jye
It didn’t matter how it was said - everyone knew what it meant.
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Yeah but funguys make better jokes 
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Actually, in Old Latin it was ai (aj), in post-Classical and Medieval Latin it was a long e. Something like ae is some likely intermediate step that probably did exist at some time of Classical Latin.
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It is probably wise to find out how local people in your area pronounce Latin and use that pronunciation, else there may be misunderstandings and funny moments. Latin pronounced by English speakers always sounds so strange to me. Even the Italian-based Ecclesiastical Latin is not what I am used to, but it is definitely much closer, especially the vowels, even if they are all short in Ecclesiastical. When I went to a short botanical excursion with John Poland in the UK, I had some trouble understanding the names.
In Classical Latin the vowel length was actually much more prominent than what the stress was. One can find the length marks by macrons or acute accents in some scientific books, but probably not in many. I did find them in Rothmaler Exkursionsflora von Deutschland. They mostly correspond to what I hear from Czech botanists, but sometimes they do it incorrectly. Due to historical reasons, the Czech pronunciation of Latin is actually quite close to the German one.
One can check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_regional_pronunciation It is a great resource eventhough probably oversimplifying it - there is more than just one Slavic, the Czech one definitely distinguishes short and long vowels and might be closer to the German one, but with z for z.
He pronounced it as Russian “ае”, so “a” in llama and “e” in lemon with soft “l”, it just takes too much time to pronounce and does affect understanding what the person is saying, saying “aj” would be easier, or probably conforming to norms of what everyone around says fits too. But, there’re always conflicts, remember one about how soft “L” should be, some say it hard and not care, some say it as soft as possible, others say it’s in between, texts say it’s as in French, but there it’s not clear too.
Yes, that’s the typical American English pronunciation, probably in part because the genus name has entered vernacular usage here and appears in garden catalogs, nursery websites, etc. Pronunciation in my Merriam-Webster dictionary app is ˈfīkəs.
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There’s nothing about things being modern or prehistoric species that affects the language used. You can also use any language, or none at all (an arbitrary combination of letters, as long as it’s pronounceable). Latin is the base for things like possessives and location names, but when using other languages its rules go out the window. I work on Hawaiian species and name most of my species with Hawaiian words.
edited to add: one advantage of using languages other than Latin or Greek is that if you use one without grammatical gender, then if a species it gets moved to another genus then the species name stays the same.
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I was just reminded again of a common mispronunciation that our students seem to love in seminars and lab talks: Dross-PHEE-lia (instead of Dro-SO-phi-la) for fruit flies (Drosophila). Has anyone else heard this? It’s driving me mildly nuts and I’m wondering if they pick it up from one of our instructors mispronouncing it or if it’s a more wide-spread phenomenon.
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Never heard that pronunciation for Drosophila. Even if you allow for variation in pronunciation of the vowels, it doesn’t really make sense based on the spelling of the name.
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I know - that’s why it’s driving me nuts whenever I hear it!
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