Jim Shields wrote: “My favorite nomenclatural conundrums involve botanists with Russian or other names transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet by German botanists. Fortunately, I cannot think of any concrete examples at the moment.” On the Yahoo lilium list a discussion of hybridizing with lilies of the Caucasian group came up this week. Several people are trying to get hybrids between L. monadelphum and L. szovitsianum on the one hand and lilies belonging to other groups. I wrote in to point out that this is possible: it was done in the early twentieth century by the great Russian horticulturist Michurin. I then went on to cite the name of one of his hybrids. I remembered it as ‘Fialkovaja’, but current English language sources give the name as ‘Fialkovaya’. No doubt the name came into usage in the English-speaking world through German usage (that’s the way it usually happened in the past), and the old German spelling Fialkovaja is out there in some old English language publications. In other words, the Germans transliterated the name as Fialkovaja, the English speaking world now uses the transliteration Fialkovaya. The seeming difference in spelling makes no difference in all in the pronunciation because German ja is pronounced as English ya. This is a good example of the point that one goal of transliteration is to represent the sounds of the source language in the target language. 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/