A few pronunciation pointers

A few pronunciation pointers. There's nothing pretentious about using a fishes' scientific name. And nothing to be afraid of, because those bad Latin and gobbledy-Greek scientific names should be pronounced as if they belonged in an English-language sentence, anyway, if it's English you're speaking.
 
Every language has its own conventions about pronouncing foreign words, and English is as insular in this matter as Japanese. Some of us have had some Latin and will impress you with our "correct" academic pronunciation: waney weedy weekie: pay no heed. The best practice is, don't break up a spoken English sentence with a scientific Latin name that you give an exaggeratedly correct pronunciation, as if it were printed in italics. Think of that balloonhead who spent a weekend in "Paree."  If this were a Francophone page, I'd be telling you instead to pronounce those scientific names as if they were almost French, n'est-ce pas?
 
 
Sound out an unfamiliar new name and say it a couple of times quietly to yourself, just the way you would if it were the name of a new acquaintance or workmate. Then pronounce it loud and clear with bright confidence, as though you knew what you're doing. But keep listening to other people's pronunciations, and if they sound more accurate, well, go with the flow: I was raised saying "GOOR-a-mee," so I have to pause on the sidewalk before entering a New York LFS and say to myself, "Grammy. Grammy. Grammy."
 
In the 18th century, when the Swede Carolus Linnaeus and his French and Polish and English scientific correspondents chattered away in their common language — which was Latin — their various local pronunciations made Vergil roll over in his grave, you can be sure! Scientific Latin grew upon sturdy roots in the international educated lingua franca of the Middle Ages. And that Latin was the Latin of the Roman church, not the golden-age Latin of Cicero's orations.
 
I've noticed a couple of strait-laced doctrinaire accounts on the web, in which well-educated foreigners with flawless English will try to reform your Latin pronunciation. I wouldn't send you there. Michael W. Vasey's more permissive "Fishkeeper's guide to pronouncing scientific names" is archived at the Columbus Area Fish Enthusiasts website. Another good one-page guide to pronunciations, with three rules on which syllable to stress (always a toe-stubber, eh?) is Peter Ommundsen's "Pronunciation of biological Latin."
 
Still, a couple of pointers couldn't hurt: Latin words have much the same rhythm and emphasis that they have retained in modern Italian. If you can pronounce "Pizzeria Italiana" with the right rhythmic emphasis, you're halfway there. But Greek has a sliding emphasis that stays on the next-to-the next-to-last syllable — that's the antepenultimate syllable, in fact, as in "antepenULTimate."
 
Latin, like Italian, has no silent letters: pronounce them all, even e: latipes is "LAT-i-pees."
 
Hard or soft C and G? Same as in Italian — and in Church Latin, if you're old enough to remember: hard "K" sound in Ca Ga, Co Go, Cu Gu, and soft "S" sound in Ce Ge, Ci Gi. Think "gigolo" "cigar" "magical" "cogent" "cubical" "circus" etc.
 
Two vowels together? Don't slur them into a dipthong but pronounce each: "ratio" is "RAH-tee-oh." Except we commonly slur together those -oides ("looks like") name endings into "OY-dees."
 
But Latin and Greek do have some unusual vowel or consonant combinations that can make you uneasy. For example:
 
AE: It's always just the same familiar long E sound as it is in "Caesar" or "encyclopaedia." That includes the Latin feminine possessive ending: "alumnæ" is "a-LUM-nee." "Edith's Betta" is Betta edithæ "BETT-uh (not 'BAY-tuh' by the way) EE-dith-ee." Yes, you've heard different. But the Skeptical Aquarist knows.
 
AU: It's often "awe" ("caudal" fin) where the word is somewhat naturalized, but "ow" is a smidge better when it's not: aureus: "OW-ree-us".
 
CH: This is a Greek letter combination, not a Latin one, and it's always hard, as in the dreaded "Ich" ("Ick" not "itch").
 
OE: It's the same Greek "oe" as in "Phoenix." So Noemacheilus is just "NEEM-a-KILE-us." Whew!  In English, the more comfortably naturalized a Greek word with an "oe" in it gets, the more that "o" tends to drop out: "foetus"? "oecumenical"? Not any more! "fetus" and "ecumenical" have followed "oeconomy" into our normal language, though still without any changes in their sounds. So, now at last you know how to pronounce Poecilia! ("pee-SILL-ya"!)
 
Appalling initial combinations of letters like the PT in Pterophyllum or, worse, that CT in Ctenobrycon represent Greek sounds without English equivalents. Ignore the P and the C, just as you ignore that P in Pseudotropheus.
 
I hardly need to remind you that Latin (and Greek too) nouns all have gender: masculine, feminine and neuter. And that the adjectives conform to the nouns. Mostly easy. But some Latin singulars and plurals don't follow the most familiar patterns, and that can be confusing. A couple of points are worth remembering: The singular of species is also species: "our human species." "all the Cichlid species." Species can be abbreviated "sp." if it's just one species, and "spp" if they're plural. The plural of genus is genera. (Because Latin inherited the word genus and never did manage to make it fit the normal pattern, that's why!) In English, "genuses" would be too like "geniuses," anyway.
 
Lots of scientists' names have been immortalized, resulting in some barbarisms like the tasteless flattery of "herbertaxelrodi." Pronounce them as they are in the original. Some native names get latinized too: Colisa chuna is Bengali, I think, and pronounced "CHOO-na." If you remember the spelling, you won't change Microsorum ("MI-cro-SOR-um") into "Microsorium" or Hygrophila ("High-GROFF-ila") into "Hygrophilia,"on the pattern of "necrophilia."