pronunciation
John C. MacGregor (Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:04:55 PDT)
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