> Cingulata (pronounced "tchingulata")
As an English speaker, this makes me more confused about the pronunciation, not less.
As an English speaker, this makes me more confused about the pronunciation, not less.
As you note "cingulata" is fairly uncommon. I have no idea how to pronounce that, and so their guidance still leaves me in the dark about everything but the first letter.
For phonetic guidance something using the International Phonetic Alphabet seems like the way to go. I think that would give something like this: tʃiŋgyəˈlātə, -ätə
That's just a guess taking the IPA for cingulata from Merrian-Webster (siŋgyəˈlātə, -ätə) and replacing the "s" with the "tʃ" that the Macmillan dictionary gives for the "tch" in "latch", which is the first word that came to mind that has a "tch".
(Also, I believe many publications use their own variants on the IPA, so I'm not sure that what I gave is actually proper. If MW and/or Macmillian have their own, the above could be some weird bastardization with little meaning).
> History and Etymology for Cingulata New Latin, from Latin cingulum, cingula girdle + New Latin -ata
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cingulata#:~:text...
It's a common mistake English speakers do all the times
The rule is quite simple: a C followed by the vocals e and i is always pronounced tch in Latin.
Latins used K for "hard C" like in "corn" and S for the s sound like in "cent"
We are talking about classic Latin, born around the IV century b.c.
But it changed a lot over the centuries influenced by the Greeks, to the point that the Byzantin Roman empire chose Medieval Greek as official language at the end of the VI century and even before, their Latin was different from the classic Roman one. I think they abandoned Latin as official language in the third century to use Koinè Greek (sorry don't know the name in English) basically a Greek dialect, the first common form of Greek, used among all Hellenistic cities which eventually became modern Greek, still in use nowadays.
Most of the Latin found in science (like in the animal taxonomy) comes from "modern" ecclesiastic Latin which incorporated traits of vulgar and neighbors languages (French, German and Italian), it simplified the alphabet but reduced the symbols available so C was mad an affricate consonant.
In practice we have dealt with modern Latin or some form of it for the past 15 centuries, longer than Rome existed.
MW (from your link) says it's pronounced "siŋgyəˈlātə" which is definitely not "tchingulata", no matter what Latin says.
It also says that bus is pronounced ˈbəs, but it's a contraction of French omnibus, that comes from Latin omnibus, which is pronounced ɔmnibus (both in French and Latin), like goose, but with a much shorter oo sound.
Anyway the point was is English language that stole words from other languages and changed their pronunciation, not the other way around.
That's what happens when a language steals a foreign word (Latin in this case) and changes its pronunciation
In Latin the way groups of letters are pronounced it's (almost) unambigous, it's a phonetic alphabet itself
If you change the pronunciation, that part is lost and you have to rely on recollection instead of recognition
It also means that if you don't already know a word you can't be sure on how it is pronounced
The correct transliteration is Čajkovskij and the correct phonetic one is tɕɪˈkofskʲɪj