Pronunciation Guide

[Thunil]

There's actually an oldish book (60's or 70's I think) in my uni that is called something like a "guide to biological pronunciation" or something similar, when I had a flick through it it seemed pretty easy to use/understand so it might be worth having a look for it.

 

And I think you're right, seeing some of the huge amounts of effort that people put into informative posts around here I'm sure a pronunciation guide wouldn't be too much work, but I'm not good enough to put one together, haha.

 

Daniel

[johnmaloney]

haha...I still don't say "Kite-Un" for Chiton, or "Kato" for Chaeto. "ch" should sound like "ch"

 

Languages change for good reason, we still have the letter K if they want to change the spelling I figure.

[Gaffer]

Cheato should be pronounced key-toe.

 

The one that gets me going id there is a guy at the LFS that say nudi -branches (as in a tree). I said nudibranchs (nudi - branks) one day and he looked at me like I was nuts.

 

Scientific names and latin is one of those things that you learn the more you are exposed to them. For me I use them almost everyday in my line of work as a biologist, but it takes time to "speak" it correctly.

[farkwar]

Tomato tomato kato cato

[el fabuloso]

Porites (por-EYE-ah-tees)

[Genesis]

It is easy for me: I do not know the correct pronunciation nor does my LFS and neither one of us pretends to know.

[timdanger]

Porites (por-EYE-ah-tees)

 

fascinating.

 

i'm not disagreeing with you, but how does the extra syllable work its way in there? That "i" is doing double-duty.

[timdanger]

i intensely defend my pronunciation of mysis shrimp (my-sis -- mee-sis gfto).

 

but, i think it extends beyond just scientific name pronunciations -- brand pronunciations are tough, too (my opinions are underlined).

 

I'm sure I've heard 4 different ways of saying "Tunze" (Tunz, Tun-zee, Toonz, Toon-zee)... same for Elos (ee-lohs, ee-loss, el-ohs, el-oss), bubble magus (mag-us, may-gus, may-jus), tropic marin (mair-in, may-rin, mah-reen), Ushio (you-she-oh, oo-she-oh), hydor (hi-door, he-door), ecotech (ek-o-tech, ee-ko-tech) ... even D-D (dee-dee, but the distributor says "dee-and-dee"), just to name a few.

[Luwanie]

I have been wondering about Tunze for a WHILE now- I've been calling it Tun-zee, but one LFS says Toonz, the other Toon-zee

[mmelnick]

I always thought it was CHAY-toe

[jeremai]

did any of you take an english course in school? lol. most of those company names follow basic phonetic rules.

[timdanger]

did any of you take an english course in school? lol. most of those company names follow basic phonetic rules.

 

i mean, English is a ridiculously convoluted language -- it's hard to say that there are any "basic" pronunciations when words like "cough" "though" "thought" "bough" "enough" "trough" or "through" are out there, giving you at least 7 different ways of pronouncing the same series of letters. there are probably more just for that "ough" letter combination.

 

edit: obviously there are some "basic" rules, but my point is that it's not always going to be clear.

 

but, beyond that, most of the ones i mentioned aren't american/english companies. and, scientific names aren't necessarily, or even usually, pronounced like english words. tunze, d-d = german. bubble magus = japanese. elos = italian, i think? ushio is a particularly vexing one, being as that it is from germany but certainly appears to be of some sort of east asian origin. i'm not sure where tropic marin is from, but from the names it uses for products, it certainly doesn't look to be from an english-speaking country. Ecotech is the only one of those that is for-sure a U.S.-based company.

[el fabuloso]

i'm not disagreeing with you, but how does the extra syllable work its way in there? That "i" is doing double-duty.

I don't know but I saw a couple of documentaries and that's how it was pronounced. Of course they were also BBC documentaries where the narrator was using Received Pronunciation so zooxanthellae was pronounced zoo-zank-TEE-lie as opposed to the more commonly heard zoo-o-ZANK-tee-lay.

 

Seriously though, english is inconsistently f'd up. It could benefit from using accent marks moreso than any other language.

[brandon429]

I read something in Eric Borneman's book Corals that was profoundly helpful with coral pronunciation.

it reminded the reader that biologists place the emphasis of a 5 syllable coral name on the third syllable (al-ve-OP-por-a) and to place the emphasis of a 4 syllable coral name on the second syllable (mon-TI-por-a)

 

I had been pronouncing it as MON-ti-por-a and ACRO-por-a

[timdanger]

I don't know but I saw a couple of documentaries and that's how it was pronounced. Of course they were also BBC documentaries where the narrator was using Received Pronunciation so zooxanthellae was pronounced zoo-zank-TEE-lie as opposed to the more commonly heard zoo-o-ZANK-tee-lay.

 

Seriously though, english is inconsistently f'd up. It could benefit from using accent marks moreso than any other language.

 

my favorite thing is how BBC guy in the Planet Earth series (David Attenborough?) says "al-ghee" instead of "al-jee"

[adinsxq]

toonzah

[jeremai]

English isn't that convoluted. sure, there are exceptions to the rules, perhaps more exceptions than rules, lol. but none of those names are hard to pronounce unless you make them hard.

 

tunze follows the same pattern as porsche. TOON-zuh

 

elos and ecotech follow the same pattern - the e is long and pronounced. EE-los, EE-co-tek

 

the scientific names are even easier, as they all follow a well-documented set of rules.

 

zoo-zan-THELL-ee

 

kee-toe-MOR-pha

 

uh-CROP-er-uh

 

but whatever, no biggie, they're just words. heck, the rep from ecotech will probably chime in and tell me its pronounced like 'banana'. like someone else said, if you're confident when you pronounce them, everyone else will just think they've been saying it wrong.