This morning a friend offered to swap a snowdrop he got under the name Green Mountain. Curious, I Googled (images) “Galanthus Green Mountain” to see what I might be getting. Evidently there are no images available under this name. But there were lots of images of other snowdrops, many of Galanthus woronowii. When I followed the link to one, it took me to an English language site which used the name “Woronow’s snowdrop” for Galanthus woronowii. The eponym’s name was, in Russian, Воронов(say voronof), so why is the snowdrop called woronowii? Because when the Russian name was transliterated, it was transliterated into German, not into English. What does that mean? When one does transliteration, the main point is to produce a spelling in the target language which preserves the sound (not the spelling) of the source language. A German pronouncing “Woronow” will say something close to the English sounds of “voronof”. Had the plant been named by an English speaking botanist, it’s likely that the name would have been spelled voronovii. That calls attention to one unavoidable problem with transliterations: there is no universally acceptable way to do it, and as a result there will be confusion about how to pronounce such words. Is one wrong and the other right? Of course not – each transliteration is appropriate for the target language in question. Botanical nomenclature contains thousands of examples of transliteration, if only because words derived from Classical Greek had to be respelled in the Roman alphabet for publication. Historically this was going on long before the inception of formal botanical nomenclature. (and the process goes right back to ancient times). In fact, this swapping of words from Greek to Latin and back, and the sometimes odd spellings which resulted, are a major source of insight into how the Classical Latin and Classical Greek letters were pronounced. It’s often said (and rightly so, I think) that we don’t know how Classical Latin and Classical Greek were pronounced in actual speech. But thanks to all the ancient attempts to represent Latin in Greek and Greek in Latin, we have a much higher level of confidence in the sounds of the individual letters. And that’s all we need for botanical Latin. Most gardeners just say them as they see them (i.e, as if they were English words), and in doing so miss a lot of the story. If you have followed this, then you have a good hint as to why Puschkinia is spelled with a “c”, even though it is based on the Russian name Пушкин , in English “Pushkin”. So, why does Puschkinia have a “c”? Jim McKenney Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7 _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/