It’s no secret that scientific names are hard to pronounce, see topic: Where Do I Start With Pronouncing Scientific Names? If you do try to pronounce them, which one(s) do you find most difficult and what do you end up calling them instead? Bonus points if it’s something you encounter regularly but…

It’s just the renowned phonetic consistency of us English speakers: short ‘a’ often comes out as short ‘u’.

For example, I would pronounce your name ‘Mar-ee-nuh Gor-boon-oh-vuh’… (and I would put the emphasis on the ‘boon’… unless I was really thinking… sorry…)

When I was a child some English-speaking group came to an open place near our playground, with different stuff to make little things like beads and postcards (we joked that it was weird), I drew my dog on a card and written its name on it - Toma, had shown it to a woman that was in that group, and l…

And that’s such a short word! Makes it obvious how crazy it is to think we can know the ‘right’ pronunciation of a made up word concocted from stuck-together bits of ancient languages! We can only conform to the convention amongst particular specialists - if that’s helpful to our credibility (thou…

It is very unfortunate that the world’s current lingua franca, namely English, doesn’t have a phonemic alphabet - unlike many other languages like Latin, Slavic languages, Esperanto, etc. It is the source of so many frustrations. A phonemic alphabet is one in which every letter stands for one phonem…

[image] DianaStuder: since our words are sourced from MANY languages. That doesn’t affect number of letters though, you don’t need to have it written the exact same way as it was in source language.

There is a bird Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax - no problem with this name. But in English it’s the red-billed chough. How is that pronounced? like tough or like though?

Wikipedia says sounds like Chuff, rhymes with tough. I agree English is crazy. The following words are similar in spelling but all have very different pronunciations: Tough, Though, Through, Thorough, Trough.

RSPB says pronounced ‘chuff’ and they should know

Which Name is Hardest?

Nature Talk

DianaStuder December 14, 2022, 5:02pm 40

and Greek. It is not all Latin.
English would struggle to produce one letter equals one sound, since our words are sourced from MANY languages.

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Which Name is Hardest?

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