Pronunciation guide

I love looking up the plants, bugs and birds, but I am having to "by guess and by golly" at the pronunciation of the Latin names. Could pronunciation tips be added to the names?

They do...right beside the name in phonetics...some of them even used to have a recording.

Oh, I just looked up the "Random Bird o' the day" Red headed Woodpecker and it didn't seem to have that.

Birds might not yet but Plants do and I'm pretty sure Bugs do too.

Here is a bug from the bug files:

Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus)


Order: Hemiptera (he-MIP-ter-a) (Info)
Family: Reduviidae
Genus: Arilus
Species: cristatus

I have no clue as to how to pronounce the family, genus, species or the name... It is hard to learn something if you have to make it up as you go along and relearn it correctly at some other time.

Isn't the word Hemiptera formed from Hemi + Ptera, with the "p" silent (as in Pterodactyl)? So wouldn't it be pronounced (hem-i-TER-a)? Sorry to be picky, but he-MIP-ter-a just doesn't sound right.

According to the dictionary it's pronounced the way Bug Files says. http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/hemiptera

I stand corrected. When I went to buy a Caryopteris, I asked for a Cary-OP-teris, and the nurseryman told me it was called a Caryo-TER-is. If even the experts don't know how to pronounce the names, what chance do we have!

Those names are tough to get the pronunciation right--even for someone who knows a lot about plants, the trouble is you read them on plant tags, in magazines, on websites, etc but most people don't hear them spoken very often, or if they do hear them spoken it's not necessarily by someone who actually knows the correct pronunciation, so you'll run into lots of variations and mispronunciations.

And things aren't always pronounced the way they would have been in the "mother language" that the words came from. I studied Latin for way too many years and I can tell you that many Latin names for plants are not pronounced the way they would have been in classical Latin. One example is the genus Acer--I think most people would agree that it's pronounced AY-ser, but the classical Latin pronunciation would be AH-care. Or if you like Church Latin better than classical Latin, it would be AH-chair...either way it would be different than the Botanical Latin pronunciation. Easy to see how some confusion can come about! LOL