pronounciation of english

The funny thing is that only English speakers every time wonder how to
pronounce a name . The explanation is simple. There are about 35
different sounds in every language. There are also about the same number
,35, of ways to write these sounds. With one exception unfortunately
.The English has about 800 different ways to write these same 35 sounds.
For me, if I see a dutch word for the first time I know in most cases
how to pronounce it. This is nearly impossible with an English word even
if you are a linguist.

I, who am no botanist but who am a linguist with a BA in Classics,
must correct this. Many languages have far more than 35 phonemes, or
meaningful sounds, and a few have fewer than that. I've worked with
more than one language of which we said, ruefully, that it has more
phonemes than speakers. (And by the way, the orthography of Dutch is
far from transparent.)

The pronunciation of classical Latin and Greek (most people who get
caught up in this sort of discussion ignore the fact that many
botanical names are Greek, not Latin) has been reconstructed in
various ways at various times, and we can be sure that the way these
languages were spoken varied from place to place and from time to
time. You can't base your pronunciation of a plant name on whatever
you heard in your high school Latin class decades ago, because
historical phonology has moved on since then.

I will not loose the standard lecture at this point, but will say
only that botanical names are best considered loanwords in whatever
language context they are being used. Most languages' speakers have a
strong tendency to treat loanwords in certain ways, such as rendering
the vowels and assigning syllabic stress. These tendencies can vary
even between two varieties of the same language; for instance,
American English speakers tend to assign stress to the penultimate
syllable of an unfamiliar word, and British speakers to the
antepenult. Moreover, American speakers are more likely to preserve
the Continental vowels than are British speakers (i.e., the vowel
pronunciations most easily heard in Spanish). These are not mistakes;
they are just characteristics of different language varieties.

If your interlocutor (the person you're talking with) understands
what you mean, you are doing all right. If he doesn't, you can write
down the word, or, if you know how, render it in a different language variety.

So stop worrying about how to say them and let's worry about how to
grow them. I am busy with the latter. I'm lifting my whole bulb
collection to move it into the new bulb house, which will be finished
tomorrow! Then the mason builds the raised beds inside it, and I, or,
I hope, some powerful hired hands, bring in the soil components, and
the bulbs go into their deep, unconstricted new homes, where they
should all be much happier than in pots. Then I can start rounding up
replacements of all the things that froze to death last December --
mostly arums, but if you can spare Gladiolus tristis, I'm missing it sadly.

Jane McGary
Northwestern Oregon, USA