Ben Zonneveld, who is a very good botanist, wrote: >The funny thing is that only English speakers every time wonder how to >pronounce a name . The explanation is simple. There are about 35 >different sounds in every language. There are also about the same number >,35, of ways to write these sounds. With one exception unfortunately >.The English has about 800 different ways to write these same 35 sounds. >For me, if I see a dutch word for the first time I know in most cases >how to pronounce it. This is nearly impossible with an English word even >if you are a linguist. I, who am no botanist but who am a linguist with a BA in Classics, must correct this. Many languages have far more than 35 phonemes, or meaningful sounds, and a few have fewer than that. I've worked with more than one language of which we said, ruefully, that it has more phonemes than speakers. (And by the way, the orthography of Dutch is far from transparent.) The pronunciation of classical Latin and Greek (most people who get caught up in this sort of discussion ignore the fact that many botanical names are Greek, not Latin) has been reconstructed in various ways at various times, and we can be sure that the way these languages were spoken varied from place to place and from time to time. You can't base your pronunciation of a plant name on whatever you heard in your high school Latin class decades ago, because historical phonology has moved on since then. I will not loose the standard lecture at this point, but will say only that botanical names are best considered loanwords in whatever language context they are being used. Most languages' speakers have a strong tendency to treat loanwords in certain ways, such as rendering the vowels and assigning syllabic stress. These tendencies can vary even between two varieties of the same language; for instance, American English speakers tend to assign stress to the penultimate syllable of an unfamiliar word, and British speakers to the antepenult. Moreover, American speakers are more likely to preserve the Continental vowels than are British speakers (i.e., the vowel pronunciations most easily heard in Spanish). These are not mistakes; they are just characteristics of different language varieties. If your interlocutor (the person you're talking with) understands what you mean, you are doing all right. If he doesn't, you can write down the word, or, if you know how, render it in a different language variety. So stop worrying about how to say them and let's worry about how to grow them. I am busy with the latter. I'm lifting my whole bulb collection to move it into the new bulb house, which will be finished tomorrow! Then the mason builds the raised beds inside it, and I, or, I hope, some powerful hired hands, bring in the soil components, and the bulbs go into their deep, unconstricted new homes, where they should all be much happier than in pots. Then I can start rounding up replacements of all the things that froze to death last December -- mostly arums, but if you can spare Gladiolus tristis, I'm missing it sadly. Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA