orchid pronounciation

[TZ-Someplace]

"But this continues into the orchid world like the phalaenopsis Tetraspis for example. I have heard people pronounce it like Tetrass-pis pronouncing it similar to how a tresspasser would be pronounced whereas I much more like to think of it as a Tetra-spiss."

I used to be a small time taxonomist and studied under some sticklers for pronunciation in the 80s and 90s (my undergrad mentor's father was god of American crayfish taxonomy, and that was just the start for me). My advisors however, were too young to have been forced to learn Latin in school, so they learned from the old timers at the research museums who spent their lives describing species collected during the age of exploration. If you have not studied Latin, putting a compound species name together is difficult because of gender matching rules. I found myself needing to do that for a new species of crab I was calling Thyrolambrus "warty arm" so I contacted a high school Latin teacher to get 'warty' and 'arm' to match each other and then match Thyrolambrus, which is gender neuter (-us). His pronunciation of my proposed species name was nowhere near the standard of the old school American and British taxonomists (That's a "V" dude, like "verruca". Why you saying "W"?). And if you listen to a taxonomist taught in a different language the pronunciation may be much different because they learned their Latin with a different accent. In the end it doesn't matter because ancient Romans are all dead and they pronounced Latin differently from the Victorian teachers of the classical languages that we English speakers get it from (or did back in the day).

I don't care how orchid names are pronounced by the general public because the names are not in a taxonomic context. It's also pretty historically screwed up, and botanists seem do things a bit differently from zoologists. Does anybody care that 'German shepherd' is wrong? That is a man from Germany who herds sheep for a living. And Alsatian is the french toast of dog names, changed because some Germans did some bad things so we have to whitewash the history of a dog and of a tasty breakfast item.

I also don't really care how the names are written out for orchids meant for the general public, but I do think scientifically oriented websites (not this one) should get it right.

phalaenopsis Tetraspis is not quite right.

Phalaenopsis is a proper noun like a family name so it should always be capitalized; 'tetraspis' is the specific epithet. It is an adjective that describes the member of the genus (e.g. the Zimmerman kid who broke his nose - scientific names used to be that long). You cannot have tetraspis without its noun, so it must always be "my P. tetraspis died", not "my tetraspis died" (I lost points on a test for that one, which is why I remember that little lecture so well 20 years later).

A scientific name should be Latinized in print just like legal terms such as ad hoc or Latin phrases like E. Plurbus Unum. The way you do that is with italic (Italian-get it?) font or the old printers instruction of underscore before and after. It would correctly be Phalaenopsis tetraspis or _Phalaenopsis tetraspis_ in print.

Also, it is bad form to start a paragragh with an abbreviated genus name. P. tetraspis...