David Ehrlich asked about the words elaiosome and elaisome. These words are formed by combining two classical Greek stems. Greek, of course, is written in the Greek alphabet. English is written in the Roman alphabet. To get from Greek to English (or any other language) one tries to represent the sounds of the Greek as closely as possible in the target language. That at least is the best, most sensible practice. When two Greek stems are combined, the traditional practice (already established in classical Greek itself) is to insert the letter o (if you are using the Greek alphabet, it is omicron; this has significance in the pronunciation of plant names because when written as the Latin letter o you have to remember that it is a short o, not a long o. If this o occurs in the next to last syllable, as in Scoliopus, it helps to know that it is short and therefore the accent shifts back to the syllable with the i in this case.) Unlike many technical words, elaiosome evidently came into English directly, not through a Latinized antecedent. Thus the spelling elaio- instead of elaeo- . Note that if this word had been intended as a generic name or specific epithet, it would be spelled elaeosom- + ending (that's how you represent the same sounds in Latin), or in modern practice, eleosome (think of all the words in which the original Latin ae has become simply e in modern spellings, at least in American English). If this word had been intended to be used for a family of plants, the oblique stem of soma would have been used giving "Elaeosomataceae". This business of inserting the connective o is more complicated if the leading stem ends in a vowel and/or the following stem begins with a vowel. In those cases, weak vowels are apt to disappear and any remaining vowels are subject to other changes. I've never seen the spelling elaisome, but if it was intentional, perhaps the person who coined that spelling was responding to the three vowels in a row: elAIOsome. Good classical practice generally would have avoided such a thing, although such strings of vowels were common in so-called Homeric Greek. Words like this intrigue me. Obviously whoever coined elaiosome wanted to retain the sound of the Greek alpha-iota sound (like that of the pronoun I in spoken English). If the standard transliteration had been used, it would have been written elaeosome, mispronounced, and eventually probably cut to eleosome, with the middle e getting a completely new sound, that of the e in the pronoun me. But there's more: whenever someone starts thinking outside the box, and not following traditional practices, it causes problems. In this case, is the intention for the word elaisome to be pronounced e-lai-some or is e-la-i-some intended? I have no idea myself, and that uncertainty will cause me to avoid elaisome and stick to elaiosome. Here's another example, and maybe someone else can explain this one (I can't). At a plant sale over the weekend, I got a plant of Silene dioica. This word dioica is causing me problems. The etymology is clearly the Greek word for two (di when written as Latin) + the Greek word for house (oikos, ditto). The conventional spelling of this combination is dioeca, and thus the English word dioecious. What has happened in the word dioica? Dioeca is a three syllable word; but is this dioica a four syllable word (that's how I pronounce it). Is the oi a standardized misspelling of oe? Is this an example of some free wheeling scholar in the past "improving" the spelling by seeming to retain the Greek diphthong oi? It's time for me to get back to weeding. Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where the south side of our little house is a fragrant sheet of Noisette roses today. See them here: http://www.jimmckenney.com/noisette_roses.htm My Virtual Maryland Garden http://www.jimmckenney.com/ Webmaster Potomac Valley Chapter, NARGS Editor PVC Bulletin http://www.pvcnargs.org/ Webmaster Potomac Lily Society http://www.potomaclilysociety.org/