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Say it your way ...

a note on the pronunciation of weigela

by Catherine Kavassalis <c.kavassalis@gmail.com>

This past summer, I was publicly admonished for my mispronunciation of the shrub named weigela. I pronounced it as my mother always had - way-gay-lee-uh.  Quite firmly, I was informed that it should be pronounced why-jee-lah.

Now while the offered alternative did make more sense than my version, I thought I should double check before spreading the word. So I looked it up on the internet. Hmm, it would appear there is quite a difference of opinion on that one.

I found dozens of suggested pronunciations including several with extra syllables. Some pronounced g as in goose others j as in gem. Some stressed the first syllable; others the second. Some pronounced the ei as in eight others like the ei as in height.

One professor of phonetics and linguistics at UCLA, a Dr. John Wells, like me grew up thinking weigela had an extra syllable and was spelt wigelia. Now he recommends, for reasons unclear to me, something that appears close to the Merriam Webster pronunciation why-jee-luh (to be fair, Wells uses quite complex linguistic symbols like a voiced postalveolar affricate and long vowel annotations which I may be wrongly interpreting).

Dr. Michael Covington, professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia provides a pronunciation guide for Northern Continental Latin used by Linnaeus - the father of botanical names. According to that guide:

w         did not exist in Latin but was used for the w sound in English

ei         was pronounced like the ei as in hey

g          was pronounced like the g as in goose

e          was pronounced like the e as in pet (if we assume it is a short vowel)

            [it would be pronounced like the a as in plate (if it were a long vowel)]

l           was pronounced like our English l

a          was pronounced like the a in about (uh)

In Latin, the stress is normally on the penultimate (second to last) syllable if it has a long vowel and on the one before (the antepenultimate), otherwise. Therefore, Linnaeus would have probably pronounced weigela -  way–geh-luh  [way-gay-luh (if the e is considered long)].

But weigela is not really a Latin word. It is the Latinized name of an 18th century German botanist, Christian Ehrenfried Weigel – pronounced vay-gl or is it vi-gull?  Oh dear...

All this is to say don’t worry about mispronouncing scientific names. If you want to know how Americans would pronounce it, check with the Taunton Fine Gardening pronunciation guides. They are always in the back of their magazines and are now online and when you click on a name and they will read it to you. When I first used this site to check the pronunciation of weigela, they had two species entered each with a different pronunciation. They now seem to have converged on why-jee-lah.  I am going with way-geh-luh just to be contrary and may throw in my old way-gay-lee-uh just to add confusion.

So have fun with scientific names and just say them with conviction – wrong or right, you will be in good company.

 

References and resources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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