[Taxacom] Asterales - is it pronounceable?

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 3/14/2012 10:09 AM, Roger Burks wrote:
> My take on the matter of pronunciation is this: sometimes scientists
> are willing to accept, as standard, the best answers available from
> the foremost experts in a field. That is perhaps the best way for
> science, but it is not always achievable in an imperfect world. The
> field in question here is reconstruction of Classical Latin
> pronunciation, and experts on this subject do exist. I take it that
> most scientists are not willing to accept this method, because they
> learned something different as teenagers, as college students, or from
> peers.

* and if there's no internally agreed-upon rules for pronouncing modern 
languages, how can there be a standard for pronouncing scientific names 
that are used in all of the languages? The relationship between written 
and spoken words is purely a matter of local tradition in English and 
Canadian French (I speak as an immigrant to the speak-as-you-spell of 
southern Ontario), and I don't suppose it's much different in other 
tongues. I well remember how dazzled I was as an undergraduate by a 
professor who used his version of "classical Latin" pronunciation to 
make unintelligible the names of Plants I'd been familiar with since 
childhood - but that was his choice, and one got used to it, just as one 
gets used to the pronunciation of francophone colleagues.

Written languages are just that, and scientific nomenclature is 
obsessive about the written form of  names, so lets not try to 
promulgate rules which would require some speakers to pronounce phonemes 
that they lost the ability to utter at age two (there's not much chance 
of Botanical Latin becoming the mother tongue of a global majority of 
households).

> If that is to be the case, then the most rational step is to recognize
> that Latin pronunciation will be necessarily arbitrary and
> inconsistent, with no "right" answers. This really takes away any
> justification that one would have to try to enforce a highly
> subjective interpretation that disagrees with all opinions on Latin
> that linguists currently hold. It's difficult to understand why a
> standard should be supported or enforced if it has no scholarly basis
> and little within-community support or awareness.

* yup.

fred
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