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." Lilium maximowiczii, Corydalis popovii, Tulipa vvedenskyi are some readers of this list might recognize. The issue Jim Shields is alluding to is probably this: the systems of transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet are several. The basic idea is to produce a phonetic spelling in the target language which fairly represents the sounds of the source language. If one is transliterating Cyrillic for a German speaking audience (i.e. to enable speakers of German to approximate the sounds of the Cyrillic original), then the spelling you would use is not the same as the spelling one would use for an English speaking audience. The reason for this is that although speakers of German and speakers of English use more or less the same alphabet, there are numerous differences in the sounds the letters represent in each language. To cite just a few examples: German W is English V sound German EU is English OI sound German V is English F sound German initial S is English Z sound Voiced consonants written at the ends of German words are not voiced when spoken (true I think in Russian also). If a German listening to a Russian word hears a V sound, he will transcribe it in the Roman alphabet as W; an English speaker will transcribe it as a V - and so on. The old double-flowered Hemerocallis fulva daylily variety Kwanso provides an example of how complicated this can be. Don't hold me to the details here because I'm pulling them off the top of my head, but I think it goes like this. Kaempfer was the first to describe this plant in the Roman alphabet; he was writing in Latin and so, hearing the Japanese name for it, made a phonetic transcription as "quanso". About a century later I think it was Regel who took the Latinized transcription and made a phonetic German transcription of the name as kwanso. In the German tradition of teaching Latin, the qua would have been pronounced kva; kwanso should therefore be pronounced kvanzo to be historically accurate. 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/