You say “ED-yoo-lis.” I say “ED-uh-lis.” We’re both talking mussels (Mytilus edulis), but which of us is pronouncing the scientific name of this edible bivalve correctly?  

“Scientific names are Latin – who’s to say how they are really ‘supposed’ to be pronounced?” asks John Galbraith, the NEFSC’s Woods Hole-based expert on naming. “I say 'yoo ’, but like many American scientists, I don’t necessarily hold to the correct Latin pronunciation,” Galbraith admitted.

The subject of pronunciation came up when an audio production company recently e-mailed the NEFSC asking for guidance on how to pronounce the scientific names of five marine creatures.

“We’re producing an audiobook that takes place on Cape Cod, and it contains some aquatic names we want to get right,” explained Brett Barry, a producer with Silver Hollow Audio, Inc. The company in the Catskill Mountains in New York is making an audio version of Henry Beston’s New England classic, The Outermost House.

“My wife and I took a trip to Cape Cod a few years ago, and we found the book and read it aloud to each other,” Barry said. The producer was so taken with Beston’s writing that he decided to make it his first project when his commercial production company expanded into audio books.

Barry secured rights to the account of life on a Cape Cod beach from Beston’s daughter, Maine poet Kate Barnes, and began preparing to record the masterpiece. But while most of Beston’s prose is exquisitely reader-friendly, there was the troubling problem of those occasional scientific names of birds, insects, and fishes. For guidance on bird names, Barry contacted Cornell. For the “oos” and “uhs” of fishes, he came to the NEFSC.

“I tried to help them,” Galbraith said. “I told them the correct pronunciation is whatever your Latin teacher tells you. In the scientific world, I hear many different pronunciations. Many of my European colleagues pronounce a harder “u” as in “oos,” and many Americans do not. I even can’t say there is a distinctly American way to pronounce these terms – I can only say there is much variation.”

“The people at Cornell told me the same thing,” Barry said. “No one speaks Latin anymore, so you have some latitude in how you pronounce the names.”

All of which is okay with the producer. “I just wanted to know we wouldn’t be so far off it would be embarrassing,” he said.

So in the end, will we hear “oos” or “uhs” when the Silver Hollow CD of The Outermost House hits the air in June?

“We’re going with ‘MITE-til-lis ED-yoo-lis,” Barry recently told The Ffiles.

Posted March 19, 2007