How do you say "fagus"?

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JohnPW

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OK I guess it's not a word that's often spoken aloud but how do you say "fagus" as in fagus sylvatica, the European beech?

Is it fa as in "far" or "father", then gus like the name "Gus"?

Or is gus like "goose"?

Or maybe the first a is short as in "mag"?
 
I'd pronounce it

fay (as in Faye Dunaway) and gus (as in Gus Grissom)

That doesn't make me right of course, but that's what I'd say!

There are a few pronunciation traps in woodworking.

Wenge, the African timber, should be pronounce When and Ghee (as in Indian butter), not wenje or wenjee

And what about cornice? In the north it's a cor-niss, but in the south it's a cor-niece.

Full time cabinet makers generally seem to say sash cramp rather than sash clamp.

And another African timber, Padauk, should be pronounced Padook.
 
From talking around among foresters and botanists in general, Fay and Gus are the prevalent form. But since all these names were standardised by a Swede (Linnaeus), presumably using whatever was the contemporary form of spoken latin in Sweden, anything could be "correct".
Why is the OP interested?
 
It's tricky because Latin has a number of different schools of pronunciation, even amongst scholars, with inter alia, British, French, German, Italian and Finnish ways of speaking the language. There is general agreement however on the most likely way in which educated Romans may have spoken at the time of Cicero (known as Latin's 'Golden Age.').
Under this 'Pronuntiatio restituta' , you would have a as in 'far' and u as in 'put' so sounding like 'fargus'. The second part, by the way, should sound like 'soolwatica'
 
dickm":25zhqart said:
From talking around among foresters and botanists in general, Fay and Gus are the prevalent form. But since all these names were standardised by a Swede (Linnaeus), presumably using whatever was the contemporary form of spoken latin in Sweden, anything could be "correct".
Why is the OP interested?
The main reason Latin was used (afaik) was that it was long dead, thus unchanging. I don't believe anything contemporary had any bearing. (again, afaik)
 
According to YouTube, it's something like "fa-goose" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFgI3XsYfvY - but then it probably depends which Roman accent you've got. If you've got an 'aye-oop' North Roman accent, it would be 'fag uz', if you've got a sarf Roman accent, it might well be 'far-goose' (just like Bath is pronounced 'Barth' by southerners), and heaven knows what Brian Sewell would have called it!

Me, I think I'd just call it 'beech' and have done!
 
I also pronounce it Fay gus - I was a professional botanist and worked as a plant taxonomist in the herbarium at RGB Kew for 8 years after getting a degree in botany and working as a post-graduate research assistant for a further two years. Fay-gus was certainly the 'normal' pronounciation at the time but these things can and do change over time.

Misterfish
 
Quite right too MrFish :eek:

Don Quixote has done the rounds

Don Quick-shot -- Don Key-oh-tay --DON kwix-oat

Let's not get started on Boadicea :(
 
More rubbish on YouTube, then!

For those that know, is holly (Ilex) pronounced 'eye-lex' or 'ill-ex'?

(For thuja, I'll go with 'thoo-ya' - but on my current performance, that's almost certainly wrong!)
 
misterfish":whti7o4u said:
I also pronounce it Fay gus - I was a professional botanist and worked as a plant taxonomist in the herbarium at RGB Kew for 8 years after getting a degree in botany and working as a post-graduate research assistant for a further two years. Fay-gus was certainly the 'normal' pronounciation at the time but these things can and do change over time.
... and anyway, now taxonomists have access to DNA technology, it's probably only a matter of time before F. sylvatica gets moved to some wildly different genus like Taraxacum or something equally bizarre.
I'm sure they just do it to befuddle us elderly agrobotanists.
 
And another one - lime (tilea vulgaris). Is it 'till-ear' or 'tile-ear'?

(We can probably all manage 'vulgaris' if pushed.)
 
I always assumed it was fagus to rhyme with magus.

Wood names generally are a minefield where even something that looks as simple as ipe is a trap for the unwary (if you're not familiar it isn't eyepe as in rhymes with Skype, it's two syllables: eepay).

As for the Latin names, we're English speakers so any and all formal pronunciation rules for Latin don't apply, in the same way they don't for Trajan and Caesar for example, which sound very odd indeed if you want to say them 'proper': Trah-zhan and with a K at the front respectively.

Padauk I think most pronounce incorrectly. I've heard native speakers (Burmese) clearly sound a double syllable at the end, so that's how I say it: something like padaook. The dictionary gives it as pəˈdaʊk; -ˈdɔːk for British English which supports this (puh-douk for American English).

The one I had most trouble with personally is sapele, which for years I only knew from reading and never heard spoken. As I thought it was an American wood I pronounced it accordingly. Once you know it's African the correct pronunciation, sapeelee, doesn't sound so weird.

Ilex I would assume is normally pronounced eye-lex by native English speakers (just like ibex). That's British English specifically, there could easily be other norms for our cousins in both NZ or Oz and across the pond, as with the American norm for padauk.

Tilea I'd say was till-eah.

Wenge, more wengay than wengee.

How about Quercus robur? I'd be inclined to say it with -sus at the end, but apparently it's supposed to be -kus (-kəs to be more precise).
 
In the 18th century nobody had spoken latin in a very long time so various local corruptions of the pronounciation had developed among scholars in various parts of Europe.
The Swedish pronounciation of Latin was indeed very corrupted at the time (has largely been corrected since) and the English and the Finnish pronounciations still are. Just about as far as the Shetland dialect is from the English taught at Oxford.
Back when Latin was still spoken there were many dialects of it some of them just as old or older than the official form of Latin and some being crelolized forms of the laguage spoken by the colonial lords in for instance Gaul and Hispania. Old Cicero would surely have heard them all and accepted them as forms of Latin.
Though had he heard the "Latin" pronounciations taught today in Finland and England he would surely have taught the latin teachers several dozens of new dirty expressions in pure Latin and thrown them out the door.

I think fagus is pronounced something like fag-oos With the "a" being Scotish.

By the way I think "tilea" should be pronounced something like till-ee-a

The reason for comparing with Scotish is that lowland scotish is the only form of English I am able to pronounce in an underatandable way. Being a native speaker of a far flung dialect of Swedish I find many sounds in Queens English impossible to pronounce.
 

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