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Filippo Calzolari
said, "I'm italian and I pronounce names as
Romans did."
Oh, Oh!... He
didn't capitalize the I in Italian, as most Italians do! :-) And,
Titan is Greek in origin, not Roman.
He also said, "You
create the name, you want it spelled one way and others have to follow your way
even if it's wrong..interesting;[note:this is directed to
Mr.Stanford]"
Paralititan was a name created by Kenneth J.
Lacovara, Ph.D. of Drexel University in Philadelphia, for the great
Egyptian sauropod, and if one really wants to be right, spell it the
way the paper does and, by my preference, even pronounce it the way the
authors prefer. It is, after all, their 'child'. Have they no
right to spell and pronounce its name their way? O.K., pronounce it
differently if one likes, but closely enough that one knows of what you
speak. However one chooses to pronounce the name, it is beautifully
descriptive, and I think it one of the nicest names to crop up in a long
time.
Calzolari further said, "...I'm sorry first scientists knew latin pronunciation rules better than
you do, but this is not a good reason to say that people who still (for one
reason or another) know how to read it have to change because of
this."
Perhaps you read too much into my words.
But maybe Filippo Calzolari and many of
us might agree (?) on this: Americans, in general, seem to have some
laziness or sloppiness about properly pronouncing names not of English
origin, sometimes including dinosaur names. Most of our network TV
news anchors do not help matters and are often disturbing in this respect.
I recently heard my fellow Texan, Dan Rather, pronounce the same foreign
name at least three different ways during a single evening news broadcast!
What would he do with Piatnitzkysaurus floresi? :)
Ray Stanford
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