Honestly I never thought seriously about it, cause I just use the common name Араука́рия, and it does sound as what you propose, so in my books it’s correct.))
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I had that problem with mule deer. Always wrote it as Odocoileus hemonius (he-mo-ni-us). Only a few months ago did I find out it is actually hemionus (he-mi-o-nus). I don’t really like that spelling, because it reminds me of Hermione from the Harry Potter stories, who certainly was not like a mule.
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Some random ones that popped in mind:
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Leucauge. I can never figure this one out. Is it Loo-cage (the “a” being pronounced like a “u”) or Loo-cow-ghee lol
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Rhene. I personally pronounce it as René like the French name but I feel its something like Reene.
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Hebomoia glaucippe. Do I pronounce the “e” at the end of the species name!?
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Yeah, but it’s impossible to say without it? glauicipp sounds awful.
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Yeah I pronounce it with the “e” too.
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I don’t think there are silent vowels in any scientific name, including at the end of the word. Only exception would be if the specific epithet or genus incorporates someone’s name that includes a silent vowel.
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I wonder what’s the most common scientific name that everyone pronounces wrong? I have seen many a scientist butcher a Latin name, and not just the “i” versus “ii” or “dee” vs “day”.
Case in point my favorite moths are Catocala (Ka-tock-allah), but I hear so many people say “Cat-oh-ka-la”
And both are right as well as wrong (probably). As discussed in another thread, there is no formal rule for pronunciation of scientific names.
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Hmm, I’d say “KA-to-KA-la” is probably more right… it’s Greek Kato (=hind) + Kalos (=beautiful) (because of the beautiful hindwings). But the most important thing is to say it confidently…
The one that always grated with me was when there was an outbreak of disease in the news ages ago attributed to Clostridium difficile, and all the doctors on the news prounced difficile as if it were the French word… all those years of having ‘no soft c’s or silent e’s in Latin’ banged into my head made that feel really annoying! But it matters not a lot.
At the moment my favourite long one is Dryophilocoris flavoquadrimaculatus.
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How about scientific names of concepts? Batesian mimicry is named after Henry Bates, so I suppose it should be pronounced “BATES-i-an.” But the way it is spelled, and the way I learned phonics, I naturally want to pronounce it “ba-TE-sian,” as in rhyming with that kind of well which flows with its own pressure. We do not speak of ARTS-i-an wells, do we?
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Mr Bates wins this one!
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Pronunciation doesn’t have a hard rule but usage over decades will usually settle on one pronunciation out of many. A friend told me one time that he gave a talk on Colias butterflies and he lost legitimacy with his audience because he said Cole-eye-uss instead of Cole-ee-uss, so I am quick to adapt to whatever expert usage is. Seems stupid for that to happen but it’s easy to change the way I say a word.
Larry Gall and Bob Borth (experts on the genus) are firm on Ka-tock-allah so that’s what I use.
Sure. When in Rome do as the Romans do :) (Latin irony intended)
If I said ‘Clostridium di-FIK-i-lay’ to a medic they wouldn’t understand me, or worse, they’d think I was very pompous - even worse - they’d be right!
Problem for most of us is that we’ve only ever seen most of these names written. Out of interest, in Ka-tock-allah where is the emphasis falling?
stop, where the “u” comes from in Colias? It should be just koleeas
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It’s just the renowned phonetic consistency of us English speakers: short ‘a’ often comes out as short ‘u’.
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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 like, she failed hard pronouncing it, I wasn’t studying English at that time (my first teacher was bad) and had no idea about accents or how English speakers talk at all, but she really said it like Tomaah, I tried saying it again but it went awkward too fast and I said yeah, that’s the name.)
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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 (though as @rayray said it seems silly that it should be so). I’m sure specialists from different countries will tend towards different pronunciations of the same binomials based on nothing but the characteristics of their own mother tongues.
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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 phoneme only (or a combination of phonemes) so you can easily read it “letter by letter”.
It is one again unfortunate that ICZN has not standardized the pronunciation of the binomial nomenclature interlinguistically. Now every language tries to read it in a different way, not to mention that Latin itself can be read in many ways depending on its version. At least the latter was resolved in later versions of ICZN Codex where it was stated that the binomials should be in Classical Latin. Since trying to pronounce binomials in English is very painful for all sides of the communication - some English biologists have suggested that names should be read as in Classical Latin per the Codex rules and for the better of humanity. Unfortunately this practice hasn’t caught on even though it is the only reasonable pronunciation. In Bulgarian we pronounce it close to what should be the Classical Latin and generally I don’t bother to Englishize it (either mentally or in speech) though I use English mostly in written form anyway.
The only problem to Classical Latin pronunciation is that not all binomials are actually written in Latin or are Latinized - mostly specific epithets bearing the name of some biologist or place. They usually keep their original spelling in whatever language that may be. So to pronounce them, you have to know in which language they are and how they are pronounced in that language! For example how the hell do you pronounce Australopithecus bahrelghazali?! Or Simulium colombaschense?
So I find such non-Latinized names the hardest to remember and read.
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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.