Hi Ellen,

Learning to pronounce is a gradual process, as everyone has said, and I
think all that advice they are giving you about not worrying about it is
great advice! Nobody has a lock on correct pronunciation, no matter how
many latinists come on here now and tell me I am wrong. It is good, and
satisfying, to learn to be intelligible. But not always socially
acceptable.

Example: For years our entire shell club (now defunct, probably from bad
pronunciation) called those fragile purple pelagic snails, "jan THEEN'
uh."  Then somebody came back from a trip to a shell convention
pronouncing it "JAN' thin uh."  Yup, we all shifted to be au courant
with the latest shelllatin. No questions asked. But then we had a
visitor from a Florida shell club, down in the thick of the shells, a
woman who was really lah di dah in her pronunciation. She went on and on
about "ee ANTH in a" and, when we finally figured out what it was she
was saying, and, of course, after she left, we rudely hooted at her
airs. Even when we later learned she was "right," we were bratty about
it. I mean the whole club was! We adopted the new pronunciation, yes,
but we did it complete with her pretentious enunciation forever after!

Another object lesson. When I first started collecting, Mr Seashell,
Tucker Abbott, visited our club. I'd just gotten his book, the old green
1st edition of American Seashells, and I could not believe my good
fortune to be meeting the author! Even more exciting, the party for him
was at my house! I hung on his malacological coattails all night, in
between emptying ashtrays and refilling the chips and dips. And listened
to his wonderful upeast accent (familiar to you, of course, exotic to
us.) Another shelling great, Walter Sage, was in our shell club and he
and I had been worrying over the pronunciation of "costata" for a while,
so we put the question to Tucker. He said it depended on where we were
from. "How do you pronounce t-o-m-a-t-o?" he asked? Walter and I,
midwesterners both, replied "toe MAY' tuh" Tucker said, "Then you
pronounce it 'coe STAY' tuh' while I, on the other hand, say 'toe MAH
tuh" and "coe STAH tuh" Walter and I thought that a super analogy and
quoted it at each other many times thereafter.

One more thing: Peter Edgerton says he'd say "ZEN-o-FOR-a" and that is
probably as fine a way as any to say it. But there is a rule on that one
that I always remember because of a wonderful word used to describe the
syllable you always accent.  It goes like this, "In words of three or
more syllables, always place the accent on the antepenultimate syllable.
Try that one on your Scrabble board! (Ante=before pen=next to and
ultimate=last.)  It rolls around nicely in the mouth, trips off the
tongue, and makes the accent easy to remember. Of course all bets are
off on two syllable words. Anybody got a rule? However I don't know if
one follows that rule when it makes gobbledygook of a person's name. (I
don't.) For instance, one pronounces the person's name "CUN ning ham"
but would the shell named after him be pronounced (according to the
antepenultimate rule) cu NING ham i?

Anyway, best advice? Relax and do your best. And start learning what
some of the prefixes, suffixes and stems mean. Often they are very
descriptive and that in itself helps you remember the Latin.

Lynn Scheu
Louisville KY




Ellen Bulger wrote:
>
> I could use some general advice. I'm trying to bootstrap myself, advance from
> beginning shell collector to advanced beginner or even intermediate.  I'm
> okay at a casual level.  I've read a mess of field guides  If I find
> something on a Caribbean beach, more often than not, I can identify it,
> albeit with the common name.  It's those scientific names that stump me.
> I've tried to memorize them, but they just don't stick.
>
> It was bafflingly me.  Years ago, when I gardened, I didn't have trouble
> remembering the formal names of the plants in my perennial border.  I think
> that's because I talked to other gardeners.  Hearing people pronounce the
> names made them stick in my mind.
>
> A short while ago, as part of my self-improvement campaign, I ordered a book
> from a shell dealer.
>
> "I'd like," I said. "Recent Zee-noh-for-uh."
>
> "Oh, you mean Recent Zi-ni-fura."
>
> Oooooh. That's how you pronounce xenophora?  The dealer was very polite.  She
> didn't make me feel bad it all.  But the exchange strengthened my resolve to
> learn.
>
> I've been reading these Conch-L messages on and off for couple of years.  I
> know the topic of pronunciation has come up before, but when it did, I was
> still just absorbing general information and getting oriented.  Now I'm ready
> to hunker down.
>
> Different people take in information in different ways.  I've gotten a fair
> amount from reading.  But there's the isolation factor,  I don't know anyone
> locally who is interested in shells. (Generally speaking, if people in
> Connecticut are interested in the water at all it's as a place to sail their
> yachts. Marine life is simply a reason to buy anti-fouling paint.)
>
> I absorb some things more effectively when I hear them spoken. I don't
> suppose anyone has made an audiotape or videotape about shells or mollusks?
>
> It's clear to me that hanging with people who talk about shells would do me a
> world of good.  If I can get out of work on time tomorrow, I'm going to drive
> up to the Mystic Shell Club meeting and see if some of their smarts will rub
> off on me.
>
> Does anyone have any other suggestions?