Learning to Pronounce Latin Names

[Alberto]

It reminds me of the trick question back in my school days:

Q: How do you spell "fish"? (verbal question, of course.)

A: GHOTI

"GH" as in enough is pronounced "F"

"O" as in women is pronounced "I"

"TI" as in nation is pronounced "SH"

Interesting!!

[Alberto]

.

[sarasota alex]

There's a lot of issues relating to using latin and its correct pronunciation.

Firstly it's a "dead language" as far as the original goes - Classical Latin. So it's not certain what pronunciation was really like.

The church carried on with latin as its own language, living languages are subject to continuous change of words and pronunciation. The educated, mostly ecclesiastics, read and wrote in latin but they'd speak with a bias towards their own native tongue (no recordings of sound to show how things were really pronounced, or pronounced elsewhere).

When it came to naming plants and animals, whilst they started off with words from latin, Greek started to come into it as well. They then brought in names of people. In the earlier days people's names were often latinised, so naming species after them wasn't an issue. But now there have been many species named after people (non-latinised) and their correct pronunciation wouldn't be based on latin phoenetics, whatever anyone decided that might be. Another trend is to use names from indigenous languages and place names. It throws the whole business of pronunciation up in the air.

In reality the system was set up to give accuracy in written form, not in pronunciation. That's why you get so many "experts" giving their opinion with most of them being different.

My undergraduate advisor would always say when asked the question of how to pronounce any given name that since "Latin is a dead language it doesn't matter how you pronounce it as long as you spell it correctly!"

Totally agree!

Now I think people generally should do whatever makes them comfortable. The important thing is to respect everyone else and try to be understood. So when I speak to native English speaking palm person I say that I have a T-eye-ko-spur-ma shef-fer-eye, a Sew-do-fee-nix sar-gent-ee-eye and a S-eye-fo-fee-nix new-ceel. If I say all that to a non-English speaking palm person they won't know which palms I'm referring to, as their ear is not accustomed to this type of pronunciation. So I would say that I have a P-tee-kho-spayr-ma shef-fer-ee, a P-say-oo-do-fay-neex sar-gent-ee-ee and a Ts-ee-fo-fay-neex noo-tsay-lay

Sargentii is my only exception above. I would say say a soft "j" even though in Latin it would be a "gh". The reason is that I think that we should respect people's name and pronounce them as close as possible to the way they should be in their native language. So I would always pronounce C. savoryanum the English way or start Chambeyronia with a French "sh" sound, instead of a "ch", etc.