Some occurrences of schsch and similar horrors in plant names result from transliteration into German of Cyrillic characters, such as this one that indicates sh+ch (in English spelling) as a single phoneme (meaningful sound). German, like the related language English, uses digraphs or trigraphs to express certain phonemes. There are other odd botanical spellings resulting from this process of transliteration. A number of German botanists worked in Russian territory in the 18th and 19th centuries. When I worked in Alaska I ran across their names often. Jane McGary, Portland, Oregon On 2/15/2018 10:17 AM, penstemon wrote: > Jane wrote "California poppy (Eschscholzia californica, and if you can spell that name better, go ahead) " > Jane used the currently accepted spelling, but the eponym was spelled Eschscholtz, and most pre-WWII books used the spelling Eschscholtzia. > Here's my guess why the "t" was dropped: in German, "z" at the beginning of syllables is pronounced "ts". That would phonetically make the word eschscholt tsia. One would think that anyone who could negotiate the schsch in the same word would be able to do the tts at the end of the word - but who knows? Anyone else have an idea? > > Original spelling was “Eschscholzia”. > https://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/11630589/… > Bob Nold > Denver, Colorado > _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…