Hi it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm well have you ever had anybody correct you on your
pronunciation of a plant name in Botanical Latin as if they know the real way to pronounce it and
did you find that experience kind of intimidating or off-putting? Well fear not the truth is nobody
really knows how to pronounce things in Botanical Latin or at least it's heavily up for debate I'm
going to start with an example here the plant I'm putting up on the screen here I know as weigela
that's how I was taught to say it when I went to Horticulture school and my plant ID class
they called it weigela now I run into people all the time who pronounce this to me in different
ways some of them call it wegelia or wagelia is another way that I've heard it pronounced
quite a lot now the truth is none of these are probably the proper way to pronounce that name
it was named after a German scientist whose last name if I'm pronouncing this right and I'm really
trying was something like Weigel okay so now we've taken that we've turned it into Botanical Latin
by throwing that a on the end and then we've applied it to our local dialects and languages
and it's no wonder that we come up with a bunch of different ways to pronounce it do I stop the
person when they pronounce it differently than me and say no no actually it's weigela I know
that's a few reasons I don't do that number one I already know what they're trying to say number
two I'm not trying to be rude and number three I'm wrong too so there's really no point in us
going around correcting each other on this I want to give you some examples from my channel here on
YouTube where I talk about a lot of roses and a couple of those names that come up an awful lot
are the centifolia roses and the damask roses and I have people jump in and correct me all the time
on the way that I pronounce those let's start with the damask Rose where I hear the British
pronunciation is a little closer to damask or something like that
I've probably even said that not to their liking but the first the emphasis on the first syllable
and the second ask is a different sound than what I say is the more Americanized damask
okay now the truth is this I I take this all to go back to the city name that it's traditionally
associated with Damascus in Syria and so if you take Damascus I would take that and say well
you have uh Damascus steel and you have a damask Rose that's the way I would choose to pronounce it
whether I'm not going to go around tell them they're wrong about the way that they pronounce
it's just we should we should give each other a little bit of allowance on this for regional
differences in the way that we're going to pronounce that the other one that I heard
and this is a little amusing for people is that centifolia which is uh the 100 petal Rose or 100
leaved rows is what they call it a person from Italy came back to me and said no it's actually
pronounced chentifolia right and I go well okay I understand that you're you're speaking Italian
and Italian comes from Latin and maybe originally that CH sound was on it but English is derived in
part from Latin so we would be hearing things like Centurion Century or even just the cents that are
in your pocket as in parts of a dollar and I could comply and say I'm going to pronounce it like an
Italian but then if I said to somebody the turn of the chentury they wouldn't know what I'm
talking about in my local language and dialect now all of this stems from a Swedish botanist named
Linnaeus or at least that's the latinized version of his name and he really enjoyed ancient Latin as
the way of categorizing all of these plants and animals of course that he was trying to put into
this categorization system that he was putting together the hazard of that is that of course
modern languages especially the modern European languages have all of these Latin roots in them
but they've diverged and are often pronounced a little bit differently and certainly when you
take those letter combinations and put them into a bunch of languages some of which are not even
related to Latin they are going to to be Regional ways in which you're going to have different
consonants and different vowels or certainly put different emphasis on different syllables I
wanted to share with you that a few years ago I had Raymond Everson come to our Nursery to have
a walk around and teach us Growers how to grow clematis and I know when I say clematis that's
immediately going to trigger some people because it's pronounced very differently in British
English they would normally call it clematis or something along those lines Raymond Evison if
you're not familiar with him is sort of like the David Austin of clematis so he is a influential
breeder and grower of clematis so we figured we could benefit from some tips from him and you
know we went through the whole tour got lots of information from him and not once did he feel the
need to tell us that our pronunciation of clematis the more Americanized pronunciation was wrong nor
did we pay particular attention when he said this plant needs fresh compost even though normally we
wouldn't refer to potting soil as compost and we wouldn't pronounce it that way anyway we
all got along once again because it would be rude not to because we understood what he was
saying and because nobody really knows the proper pronunciation of anything it's just a matter of us
all getting along in a shared language so now if you're looking for pronunciation advice that I can
give you I my my plant ID teacher in my first year of college gave me some good advice that
has stuck with me number one she said try not to blend your letters try to pronounce everything so
I'll give you an example here if I have this word scabiosa on the screen that I O in the middle you
try not to blend that into scab-oy-sa or something like that try to pronounce them all so that other
people have the best chance of understanding you likewise if it's Davidii and ends with two
"i"s on the end you're going to pronounce them both the second thing she said was say it with
confidence don't correct other people and don't apologize for your pronunciation it just makes
it harder to communicate if we're all second guessing ourselves so that's all I had to say
on you we could probably uh benefit from some Tolerance on this especially when for the most
part it's kind of a written language that we all read and we don't speak it all that much and so
we can give each other that tolerance and the only other alternative is for us to get super
literal on this to boil everything down to its root words don't think it's possible so you have
to ask the question do you want to have a good time doing this or do you want to be right and
I'd prefer to have a good time growing plants and talking about them with fellow gardeners
thanks for watching if you have any questions drop those in the comments below the video