Pronunciation

Three years ago, the best advice I could find on the internet for pronouncing latin was "pronounce all of the letters and make the words sound good"  Things have Improved greatly since then.  For pronouncing the Genus species name, the Taunton Press, which publishes "Fine Gardening magazine" has a web page on their web site www.taunton.com titled Fine Gardening's Guide to Pronouncing Botanical Latin which not only gives the phonetic pronunciation to a great number of flower species, but in addition brings up a Quicktime movie which pronounces the name.

 

Further Note:  on scanning through Google I find that several people pronounce -aceae as -ay-see-ee. This is the pronunciation given in Webster's Thir International dictionary. It is also pronounced -ay-see-ay.   I've been pronouncing it -ay-say-ee.

After all of this, I have decided to scrounge the pronunciations of the families (using the -ay-see-ee ending) and binomials off the internet whereever possible.  They may be found in gold type under the scientific names.  When I have been unable to find the pronunciation on the internet, I have resorted to Webster's  Third New International Dictionary.  This required translating a bunch of symbols into a phonetic form.  Those pronunciations which are from Webster's  or which I have attempted on my own or have modified from a variety of sources are shown in gold boldfaced italicized type. 

The scientific pronunciations are different from the Latin.  They are modified to suit the habits of the speaker.  Thus an English speaker's pronunciation will be different from that of someone who speaks French or German.    There is a tendency however to try to pronounce words derived from people's name in way that the person would have pronounced their own name.  Thus wormskjoldii becomes  verm-sky-ool-dee-eye since Morten Wormskjold was a Danish botanist.