Mary Sue wrote: “ Weare going to need pronunciation guides “ Good luck! I’ve seen lots of pronunciation guides published inbooks (some of them going back more than a century), read/heard lots of pronunciation suggestions given online, heard thepronunciations used by various “experts” in talks, and they all suggest thatPandora’s box is still wide open. And then there’s this: speakers in the English-speakingworld in general are clueless about howodd our pronunciations sound to Europeans. Globalization will erode the cozy ethnocentricitywhich shielded us in the past. We want the PBS wiki to have international relevance, don't we? If I were to do a guide to the pronunciation of botanicalnames (and I have been tempted to do so for my blog), such a guide would notclaim to be giving “correct” or “right” pronunciations (if only because in myworld, pronunciation is not a matter of right and wrong, it’s a matter ofstyle). With this in mind, maybe it makes sense to describe any PBS wikipronunciations as an exercise in style, as in “this is the way we think most speakersof English will pronounce these words”. Jim McKenneyMontgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where rain, sleet and snow are falling on a garden full of snowdrops, winter aconites, witch hazels, winter jasmine, tommies, and hellebores. _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…