> The first to be scientifically described, Fuchsia triphylla, was discovered on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) about 1696–1697 by the French Minim friar and botanist, Charles Plumier, during his third expedition to the Greater Antilles. He named the new genus after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
I vote to just change the spelling to what almost everyone already thinks it is anyways.
It'll still be just as weird. But "chs" is just nonsensical. The idea that it would sound like "sh" is baffling. I mean, I know this is English spelling which is not known for its regularity, but this is just too much.
The beginning of the English word "fuchsia" is not pronounced like the German word Fuchs, so indeed the spelling does not match the pronunciation. This is independent of the fact that it comes from that word. Plenty of things in English (and, in fact, loanwords in every language) sound different from the words they're derived from; that doesn't mean trying to imitate the source language is the "right" pronunciation. If you pronounce fuchsia like "fuksia" nobody will understand you.
:)
Yeah, probably in this case English is doing the right thing, pronunciation wise.
Anyway, checking in Google Translate the pronunciation it plays "fuksia", while Wikipedia has the right version.
> But "chs" is just nonsensical. The idea that it would sound like "sh" is baffling
In the word "french" C H is pronounced sh and nobody bats an eye, I don't think it's that outlandish that someone once read it as fuch-sia, incorrectly splitting it compared to the original.
In the language French, fuchsia is unequivocally read something more like few-shia, and I'd bet that even though it comes from German Fuchs-ia (fooks-ia) English has picked it up from the French side.
If you find such a loanword weird, don't you dare try reading Japanese.
But the question here is chs, not ch. Which though rare, is widely understood to be a kind of guttural sound or "k" sound followed by an s. In -uchs or -ichs coming from German.
Damn, I always thought Fuchsia is just a colour, but today I learned
- Fuchsia is a flower
- which is named after a German botanist (Leonhart Fuchs)
- Fuchsia in English is pronounced completely different than in German.
- Google is surprisingly bad at naming their products
