not a culture question, pronunciation instead

[Gage]

Originally Posted by Ray

Unfortunately Bud, classic Latin, "church" Latin, and botanical Latin are not the same...

I did study classic Latin (way back when), so tend to lean that way in my pronunciation, but the entire world, for some unfathomable reason, doesn't agree with me on that.

This drives me crazy. I am always trying to pronounce the Latin names correctly, but I think the fact that Americans are mostly unilingual causes us to want to pronounce foreign words as though they were English words. And since Latin is for all intensive purposes a dead language (in that we cannot consult people of whom this is a first language), I think there will always be debate over pronunciation. This bothers me. Sadly I think I'm just going to continue following whatever pronunciations the "masses" use, and when all else fails go with what sounds right to me.