PRONUNCIATION OF FERN NAMES 



BY A DELL A PRESCOTT. 



I had always supposed that any difficulties with the 

 pronunciation of botanical names were due, partly to 

 my ignorance of Latin, and partly to natural dulness, 

 but when I found people who were neither dull nor 

 ignorant, speaking with a careful precision that I well 

 understood words that had often been stumbling blocks 

 in my own ferny pathway, while others slurred them 

 in a way that reminded me of the college professor who 

 always wrote the e and i in words like receive exactly 

 alike, placing the dot midway between them, I con- 

 cluded that some of the difficulties, at least, were in- 

 herent, and not to be ascribed to the deficiencies of 

 the students. 



Having reached this conclusion I appealed to the 

 editor of the Fern Bulletin for aid, to which he blandly 

 responded that he would like to have me work out 

 the problem myself and send the solution to the 

 Bulletin! So I send these few hints hoping they will 

 make the road to Femland a little smoother for those 

 who are just beginning to walk therein. 



One thing that we unscientific folk miss (unless we 

 are careful to look it up) is the helpful meaning of 

 scientific names : for these names are not given arbi- 

 trarily but because they are descriptive, or at least sug- 

 gestive, of the character of the plant. Most of them 

 are formed according to the analogies of the Latin 

 or Greek — mainly, I think, the Latin — and while the 

 correct forms may always be found in a good manual 

 it is not always convenient to look them up and the 

 following rules may be found helpful, though perhaps 

 not without exception. 



The letter e at the end of a word is always sounded, 



86 



