Latin Made Easy

So you feel dumb trying to say Latin names? Actually its not as complicated as you might think. I was lucky enough to be able to take Latin as my language in High School and its really an easier language than English. And learning to use Latin when speaking about plants helps you to be a lot clearer in your understanding, and it helps you to communicate about plants in an unambiguous manner (of course you have to be talking to another gardener for this to work--but chances are you will be). Here is a very useful and easy to understand article I ran across:
http://www.life.illinois.edu/ib/335/plant_names.pdf

The main thing to remember when prononucing a Latin word is that the accent most often is on the next to last syllable, and even though at first the word may look like an eye chart, slow down and examine it for a second--its not just a jumble of letters after all. We tend to read by inference--we only see the first few letters of a word and our brain figures out the rest without our actually reading it. We can't do this with Latin words because they aren't familiar to us. But if you stop and look at the entire word, pronouncing it becomes a lot easier. Scientific nomenclature is meant to make things easier, not harder, and there is a lot of information contained in Scientific names if you know what you are looking at. This article is easy to read and very helpful.
Hail to the dirt (Dirtus maxiumus)!