Cingulata comes from the Latin words cingŭla or cingŭlum and it should be pronounced with the soft C (like in Tchaikovsky)

> 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"

C followed by i and e is soft (as in english ch) in ecclesiatical latin and modern Italian, but my understanding is that romans actually pronounced C as hard C everywhere. I.e. Cicero called himself Kikero.

Correct, in ancient Rome C,K and Q had the same hard sound

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.

> a C followed by the vocals e and i is always pronounced tch in Latin.

MW (from your link) says it's pronounced "siŋgyəˈlātə" which is definitely not "tchingulata", no matter what Latin says.

Yes, in English

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.

If Tchaikovsky is Russian and the translation of his name into written English is arbitrary and it's pronounced "Chaikovsky", what is the "T" for?

That's also very simple: it's the transliteration of the phonetic symbol 'tʃ which represents the soft C sound as in cheese.

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 't' is from French. That's how they code the sound in the French language.

P.s. Tchaikovsky in Russian is Чайко́вский and it is pronounced Cheekousky and not Chaikowsky

The correct transliteration is Čajkovskij and the correct phonetic one is tɕɪˈkofskʲɪj

It's a slippery thing, how should the word "lead" be pronounced? Did I mean lead as in leader or lead the metal? In the English language words don't always have a unique pronunciation associated with them.