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. They're the ones where the single Cyrillic character rendered "shch" in English transliteration comes out "schtsch" in German transliteration. The usual suggestion in pronouncing them is just to sneeze quickly. Another complication is that some species epithets are nouns, not adjectives, and therefore they don't agree grammatically with the genus name; and some are in fact the names of the plants in an indigenous language -- a trend that supporters of the Fund for Endangered Languages can only applaud. Calling taxonomic names "Latin names" leads many people into confusion, because they ignore the fact that many genus names are Greek, and some elements of species epithets are Greek in origin, either modified with Latin endings or not (phyllus vs. phyllos). If you have forgotten your Latin, which is no shame, just ask; I have not forgotten mine, nor my Greek -- and thanks to a current editorial project, I still have the big classical dictionaries (and most of the modern language ones) out on the shelf instead of packed in moving boxes. Delighted to know that some people still care about these things, even though my teenage goal of becoming a Latin teacher got redirected into comparative lit. and linguistics! Jane McGary B.A., Classics