pronunciation

Well, wouldn't gatesii then be gah-tess'-ee-eye. The letter e in Latin is
not pronounced ee, but eh, with a breve diacritical mark over the e--it is a
short "e" I DO remember my 6th, 7th and 8th grade Latin.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John C. MacGregor" <jonivy@earthlink.net>
To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 4:04 PM
Subject: Re: [pbs] pronunciation

On Jul 26, 2010, at 10:59 AM, totototo@telus.net wrote:

As a general rule, once a botanist has bestowed appropriate epithets on
a
taxon, the rules of Latin pronunciation and prosody take over. In
particular,
"gatesii" would have all four vowels clearly sounded, roughly gah-
tea-see-eye.
Of course, epithets based on Pinyin (romanized Chinese) present letter
combinations unknown to the ancients, hence all bets are off. For that
matter,
even such epithets as "winogradowii" and "mlokosewitschii" are
significantly
non-Latinate.

Sorry, Rodger, but I would respectfully disagree. The reason for naming
a plant--either genus or specific epithet--after a person is to honor
that person's botanical or horticultural achievements and to perpetuate
that person's name for future generations. This is done by adding the
appropriate latinized ending to the name itself, according to
international rules for botanical nomenclature established and amended by
periodic International Botanical Congresses. As such, only the ending is
latinized. The name should be pronounced as closely as possible to the
way the person commemorated pronounced his/her name in the original
language.

William T. Stern, author of Botanical Latin: History, Grammar, Syntax,
Terminology and Vocabulary (New York: Hafner, 1966), discusses the
ramifications of this rule at the end of his chapter on "The Latin
Alphabet and Pronunciation." He notes, "The main difficulty is that this
method involves giving a German pronunciation to 'Heuchera', a French
pronunciation to 'Choisya', a Scottish pronunciation to 'Menziesia', an
Italian pronunciation to 'cesiatianus', a Polish pronunciation to
'przewalskii, etc., and to do this is more than most botanists and
gardeners can manage." In this chapter, Stern also notes that "the rules
[of Latin prosody] cannot be applied satisfactorily to all generic names
and specific epithets commemorating persons."

Furthermore, Stern states that " about 80 per cent of generic names and
30 per cent of specific epithets come from languages other than Latin and
Greek." Some of us have wider linguistic backgrounds than others, but
none of us can recognize the linguistic origin and proper pronunciation
of all commemorative plant names. Still, we should make the attempt to
learn the original pronunciation in recognition of the person
commemorated. It is also fun and often enlightening to learn something
of the biography of this person--particularly if the name honors the
discoverer of a geophyte that interests us.

Since Gates is an English name, "gates-ee-eye" is both the easiest and
the correct pronunciation.

John C. MacGregor
South Pasadena, CA 91030
USDA zone 9 Sunset zones 21/23
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