HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



M5 





THE PRONUNCIATION OF SCIENTIFIC NAMES, 



HE question as to " the pro- 

 nunciation of scientific 

 names " which has been 

 raised and discussed in 

 some of your recent 

 numbers, is one in which 

 I take a considerable 

 interest. The subject is 

 only one branch of the 

 much larger question now 

 being freely discussed 

 amongst scholars— the proper pronunciation of 

 Greek and Latin words generally — whilst, under 

 another aspect, it is only one branch of that 

 well-named "Opprobrium Botanicorum " — the 

 subject of botanical nomenclature, a subject upon 

 which I have a few crotchets, which I should be 

 glad, on some future occasion, to have the oppor- 

 tunity of airing in your journal. 



Your correspondent Mr. Newlyn makes two assump- 

 tions, from both of which I beg leave to differ. First, 

 he assumes that we have no means, except accentuation 

 (by which, from his reference to "the poets," he 

 plainly means quantity), to guide us to a knowledge 

 of the mode of pronunciation which the Greeks and 

 Romans themselves adopted : and, secondly, he as- 

 sumes that "university men" at the present day 

 acquiesce in the barbarous practice of English 

 scholars during the two or three last centuries 

 only, of pronouncing Greek and Latin words as if 

 they were English ; whereas those who know the 

 Universities know well that both there, and in our 

 large public schools, a sturdy effort is being made to 

 bring back the pronunciation of Greek and Latin 

 words to what we have good reasons for knowing, or 

 believing, was the actual pronunciation in a Greek 

 or Roman mouth of classical times. And to those 

 who give themselves to the study of the subject, 

 indications of the old method of pronunciation are 

 not [wanting ; although the difficulty of arriving at 

 a satisfactory solution is greatly increased by the fact 

 that then, as now, the pronunciation in different 

 NO. 163. 



provinces at the same time, and in the same province 

 at different times, varied considerably. 



However, means for recovering the old pronuncia- 

 tion are not wanting to those who are on the look- 

 out for them. One principal source of information 

 is the mode in which the ancients represent natural 

 sounds, which certainly have never changed, and for 

 the vowel sounds this alone is almost sufficient. Thus, 

 Aristophanes, in the " Acharnians," introduces a 

 countryman with a pig under his arm. And the 

 part assigned to the pig is written (I write in Roman, 

 not in Greek letters) km — Aoi — km: now let any one 

 repeat ko-ee, ko-ee, ko-ee, several times, rapidly, 

 and he will find that it gives perfectly the sound of a 

 pig's squeak, and leaves no room for doubt that by 

 Aristophanes and his contemporaries the letter i was 

 pronounced ee. Again, the Latin word for a breast 

 is mamma. And there can be no question that a 

 Roman infant called for the breast in exactly the 

 same sounds as an Anglo-Saxon infant calls for the 

 mother who presents it to him, pronouncing the a as 

 ah. So — cuculus (the cuckoo), ulula (the owl), 

 mugire (to low like a moo-cow), supply plenty of 

 proof that u was sounded like double ; not as 

 we sound it, as if it was written yoo (which is really 

 a diphthong — cc-oo). 



Then as to consonants. That c was always pro- 

 nounced hard before e and i, as well as before a, 0, 

 and u, is manifest from many indications. Thus, it 

 always represents the Greek kappa, in words derived 

 from the Greek ; e. g. Kentauros is represented by 

 Centaurus. Kimmerioi becomes Cimmerii, and (by 

 transposition) in English Crim-Tartary and the 

 Crimea, which shows that the c was pronounced 

 hard when the transposition was made. A very 

 clear indication of the hardness of the c is afforded 

 by those very numerous places in Ireland which 

 begin or end with kit, such as Kilkenny, Clonkill, 

 &c, all of which were formerly the seat of a monas- 

 tery, known as Cclla (alluding to the solitary cham- . 

 bers of the monks), and proving most convincingly 

 that the c in cclla, in the early centuries of the 



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