> I know about the dioons, members of the genus Dioon, > but Mr. Rzedowski and I are not acquainted. > > How does he pronounce his name? He can't any more, but anybody in Poland would recognize it is to be pronounced just as spelled. He was a native of Poland who lived in Mexico. Remember, my keyboard lacks phoneme keys, but in Polish the combination rz is pronounced by making at the same time the sounds for R as in English and a voiced SH, which in English is usually written ZH. This particular W is pronounced like our English consonant F. There is another consonant in Polish pronounced the way we pronounce the W in English but it is written with a letter that looks to us like an L. So it should be pronounced (using letters as a United Statian speaker might understand them) -- |r-- |zh-DOFF-skee - I suspect the proper spelling in Polish should have been Rzdowski, but on entry to Mexico it was simplified. In Mexico and among cycad people it is pronounced ze-DOW-skee. It is kind of fun verbally to ask newbies to look it up in an alphabetized cycad book or list. Leo Martin (Grandson of Leo Marciniak and Regina Budzinski) Phoenix Arizona USA