Jane McGary wrote “Another complication that arises, which hasn't been mentioned, is that writers from Russia and the former Soviet countries often come up with variant spellings of plant names when they're transliterating them from Russian floras without looking at roman-alphabet floras for comparison.” A while back I hit on this great idea: I wanted to brush up on my Russian spelling, so I though I would practice by transliterating the botanical names of plants into Cyrillic and then check them against Russian language web sites. When I did this I had just the surprise Jane mentioned: even the Russians sometimes get it wrong. Here’s something interesting I noticed recently. On the Scottish Rock Garden Club’s bulb forums there is an Armenian forum member who has posted pictures of tulips from a Russian source. What caught my eye is that the images have the Russian names of the tulips embedded in the image. But here’s what’s so interesting: the Russian names are phonetic transcriptions of English names as a rule. It would have been simple to actually translate the English into Russian, but instead the phonetic transcription is given. I fell asleep that night having fantasies of visiting Russian gardens and hearing the gardeners call their tulips by the names familiar to me but in a heavy Russian accent. Not many of the tulips we grow have Russian names: off hand, only Perestroika comes to mind. I also decided to learn the Japanese alphabet they use to write foreign words so I would be able to read Japanese botanical names on Japanese web sites: I downloaded the Japanese fonts and somehow that caused all of my YouTube hits to appear in Japanese. To be continued,,, Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, 39.03871º North, 77.09829º West, USDA zone 7 My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ BLOG! http://mcwort.blogspot.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/