personal nomenclature matter pbs vol 89 issue 40

Jim McKenney jimmckenney@jimmckenney.com
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:26:39 PDT
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.”

 

 

On the Yahoo lilium list a discussion of hybridizing with lilies of the
Caucasian group came up this week. Several people are trying to get hybrids
between L. monadelphum and L. szovitsianum  on the one hand and lilies
belonging to other groups. 

 

I wrote in to point out that this is possible: it was done in the early
twentieth century by the great Russian horticulturist Michurin. I then went
on to cite the name of one of his hybrids. I remembered it as ‘Fialkovaja’,
but current English language sources give the name as ‘Fialkovaya’. 

 

No doubt the name came into usage in the English-speaking world through
German usage (that’s the way it usually happened in the past), and the old
German spelling Fialkovaja is out there in some old English language
publications. 

 

In other words, the Germans transliterated the name as Fialkovaja, the
English speaking world now uses the transliteration Fialkovaya. The seeming
difference in spelling makes no difference in all in the pronunciation
because German ja is pronounced as English ya. 

 

This is a good example of the point that one goal of  transliteration is to
represent the sounds of the source language in the target language.  

 

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/

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