Which Name is Hardest?

And why English has “e” that can mean many sounds? Every time I want to write a transcription there’s no normal way to show “и” sound, because English “e” can mean “и”, “э”, “е”, and “i” can be “и” or can be a regular “ай”.
Taking how many languages English is based on, including Greek, those are newer additions to a language.

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While not necessarily hard, ones I use regularly that just feel disproportionately awkward in my mouth are Ascodichaena rugosa and Illosporiopsis christiansenii - I guess part of the reason is that they are common and distinct enough for people who are uncomfortable with latin names to find them and they both lack common names in Danish even though we generally do have a robust tradition for those.

As for the hardest one I have encountered, or at least the one that gave me the most pause in how to approach it would be the tiny lichenised hyphomycete (that I have never found myself but have been shown in the field in a known locality) Szczawinskia tsugae

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I do. :-)

I try to follow two rules in pronouncing scientific names:

If it’s based on a person’s name, try to be consistent with how that person’s name is pronounced (e.g., “catesbiana” is named for Catesby, presumably pronounced like “Kate’s bee”).

Otherwise, try to pronounce it in a way that is likely to make both the spelling and the separate root words most inferrable to the audience (e.g., “monticola” consists of “monti-” and “-cola”—there is no “tick” and the epithet has nothing to do with arachnids).

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but you need to ask THAT person how they pronounce it. I worked with an Afrikaans woman with the French Hugenot name Lefevre and she chose to pronounce her name as le fever. Very wary of British place names and surnames - the pronunciation sometimes seems to be deliberately :rofl: not at all what we cautiously try out.

Was in Glasgow trying to find Sauchihall Street - had to show someone the map, oh … you are ON that street.

“monticola” should be pronounced"mon-TIH-ko-la," with the accent on the antepenultimate syllable.

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curiosity led me to
monticola = highlander, mountaineer, mountain dweller.

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Interestingly, the specific epithets that end in -cola are not feminine adjectives but nouns in apposition. For example, monticola = mountain dweller, arenicola =sand dweller, etc,

My understanding is that when you see -colus to match the genus, that’s incorrect.

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This is part of why I said I try to follow two rules, not that I succeed. :-) I make my best estimate at the pronunciation; if I’m corrected, I’m corrected.

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That is one of the ways it can be pronounced, but is not the way I pronounce it. It makes it harder to identify the root words because you need to shift the emphasis correctly to recognize them. It makes it harder to spell, because English speakers tend to turn any unstressed syllable to “ə”. The familiarity of “cola” makes these issues particularly acute. If you pronounce it like the fizzy beverage (which I do), most people won’t know the meaning but will know how to spell it, and will probably recognize that “monticola” is a compound word of which “-cola” is one of the two components. Put an unstressed “kələ” at the end of a word and neither is likely to hold.

Many of my pronunciations would surely seem barbarous to scholars of both classical and ecclesiastical Latin, but that is not something I’m trying to optimize. :-)

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Don’t care about Latin scholars. Do care if the person I am talking to looks blank and says You what? In face to face conversation we have to find consensus … on the web it is easy for each of us to read (and say it in our own way)

I sweat blood if I try to follow an online discussion on audio. All the people here I can read and follow with ease … not possible if I hear you talking :sob: :scream:

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