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RE: The Most Famous All-Nighter in the History of Genetics
loci; no relation to Thor's brother
Also pronounced lo-sigh not lo-key :)
Also, IMO you are KILLING it with this series of posts. Amazing job talking about biology history and making it entertaining.
😃 🎆 ❤
I couldn't agree more with @justtryme90. This is a great follow up to your previous post on Mendel and puts a great human touch to a fundamental genetics concept.
Actually, in classical latin, c is pronounced with a hard k sound, like cat. So, loci would be pronounced luh-ki, plural of locus.
I thought the word might not be pronounced like lo-key, but I didn't look it up, because years ago I had asked a Cambridge theologian, who knows Latin like it's his second language, how the 'ecce' in 'ecce homo' would be pronounced, and he said there's no consensus, some say it should be pronounced 'eks-eh', and some 'eh-kheh'. So I reasoned the hard k could be justified.
The Anglophones prefer to mispronounce the c with an s sound. Thus the word CAESAR in Anglophone world is pronounced see-sar, when every other linguistic convention attempts to honor the original form in the German Kaiser to the Russian, Czar. The so-called lyrical latin pronounces c as a ch sound with what seems to me user preference.
Ah well. When even the BBC allows for non-standard British accents to pollute their airwaves, what matters how Latin words are pronounced in our profane times.
Well this is a "fault" of the English language itself, in that the letters don't dictate how words should be pronounced. Not even where the accent goes. Unlike Greek, for instance, where there's only one way to pronounce a word and only one way to stress it, which is indicated: Ιούλιος Καίσαρας (Julius Caesar).
It does make more sense to pronounce loci as lo-key, since the singular locus has the kappa sound.
But as it is, it's up to the individual, as it is for instance whether to pronounce the 'cc' in succinct in the same way as they would pronounce it in success (as I do), or the way they would pronounce the 'ss' in assess.
I guess the geographical spread of Anglophones throughout history as well as their borrowing words from every single language I can think of had a large role to play in this confusion.