Pronunciations

["Jerry D. Harris" <dinogami@hotmail.com>]

>     If one wants to have some listening fun, hang out at an SVP annual
> conference listening for the differences various professionals may give to
> certain dinosaur names.  In some cases, there seems little consensus.

  Well, in instances where we have, for example, the originator of a given 
name actually on tape saying the name (as we do with Ostrom and 
_Deinonychus_), then we know how it is to be pronounced, period, end of 
story.  However, this is certainly problematic when there is no auditory 
documentation of how a namer intended a name to be pronounced (e.g., 
_Diplodocus_...is it "dih-PLAH-doh-kuss" or "DIP-loh-DOH-kuss"?  I've always 
said the former, even though I say Diplodocidae as "DIP-loh-DOH-sih-day"...) 
 Which brings to mind the larger question: various languages' orthographies 
govern how to convert their words into scientific names, and I would presume 
that they also govern how to pronounced them, but are those orthographic 
rules documented anywhere?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jerry D. Harris
Dept of Earth & Environmental Science
University of Pennsylvania
240 S 33rd St
Philadelphia PA  19104-6316
Phone: (215) 573-8373
Fax: (215) 898-0964
E-mail: jdharris@sas.upenn.edu
and     dinogami@hotmail.com
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jdharris

"If one had to sum up, in one word, the reason
that human beings have not fulfilled, and never
will fulfill, their ultimate potential, that word
would be: 'meetings.'" -- Dave Barry


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