122 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. XIII 
THE PRONUNCIATION OF INSECT NAMES. 
By C. W. Woopwarp, Berkeley, Cal. 
The very able discussion by Professor Melander* of the prin- 
ciples involved in the correct pronunciation of scientific names 
fails to give rules to meet the very frequent cases where the deri- 
vation of a word is unknown as is true for most of us for the 
major part of the names we habitually use, to say nothing of the 
host of names we occasionally meet. 
It is probably true as he intimates that we are in this country 
the most erratic in this respect, and I want to protest against the 
idea that he favors of considering that scientific Latin is correctly 
pronounced one way in one country and in a different but equally 
correct way in another, especially since he advocates for America 
a pronunciation no longer permitted by the Latin departments 
of our high schools and universities. 
When the information is at hand as in the case of the large 
number of words brought together by Professor Melander, we 
should pronounce the words in the manner approved by the au- 
thorities on Latin. Those of us who are older and who have 
habits of mispronunciation so fixed that we cannot change surely 
should urge the. coming generations of entomologists to start 
right. 
There are two tendencies in our language that make it difficult 
- to correctly pronounce Latin words. 
One is the variety of the phonetic value of our vowels and our 
inconsistent coupling of sounds, a, e and 7 long having no relation 
with what we commonly designate as the corresponding short 
sounds. The English short a, which does not occur at all in 
Latin, is not infrequently heard and y may be given the value in 
the English word by and many other analogies with English words 
result in grotesque and surprising disguises of the Latin words. 
The other tendency is our habitual suppresion of unaccented 
vowels. When the accent is correctly placed the sound of the 
word is not seriously interfered with. It is only because of this 
* BULLETIN of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, Vol. XI, No. 5, De-~ 
cember, 1916, pages. 93-102. 
