[Taxacom] pronunciation of Latin, concluding remarks

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 3/20/2012 1:20 PM, Pierre Deleporte wrote:
>
> Who says "impossible?" It's just difficult, but maybe well worth the pain.
> Many people learn foreign languages. And motivated scientists are not
> children.

* but many People don't master the foreign phonemes in languages they 
learn as adults, and native speakers work around this inability when 
communicating with those who speak a natural language as a second language.

The thing that hasn't come up in this thread is the question of whether 
it's more beneficial to encourage the widest possible use of scientific 
nomenclature within each natural language by pronouncing names as if 
they were words in the natural language in which it is embedded, or to 
further distance scientific nomenclature from popular use by insisting 
on a single universal pronunciation, which only benefits infrequent 
verbal communication between speakers of different natural languages.

The major players here are not the "motivated scientists" but the 
naturalists, gardeners, and conservationists who need to communicate 
accurately about the organisms they deal with, and who are also the 
voters who elect governments that are, or aren't, sympathetic to 
systematic research.

I vote for the widest possible use of scientific nomenclature, and 
minimal obstacles placed in the way of those who would use it,

fred.
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           Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
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