Rauvolfia serpentina = Rauwolfia serpentina !

[surajit koley]

Sir / Madam,

An elaborate search in the net tells me that the accepted scientific name of this species would be Rauvolfia serpentina.

I wonder where from the name Rauwolfia serpentina came, as can be seen in many old edition of text books, and also in - http://kbd.kew.org/kbd/detailedresult.do?id=152609 , yet didn't find any mention in http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl/record/kew-176968 ?

Species : Rauvolfia serpentina (L.) Benth. ex Kurz, ; For. Fl. Br. Burma 2: 171 (1877).

Habit & Habitat : herb, plant height 2 feet avg., wild & cultivated

Date : 25-07-2009 & 27-07-2009

Place : Garalgacha (Hooghly)

ID help : http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/slides/Sarpagandha.html

Thank you & Regards,

Surajit Koley

[Balkar Singh]

Beautiful shots of Sarpgandha

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Regards

Dr Balkar Singh
Head, Deptt. of Botany and Biotechnology
Arya P G College, Panipat
Haryana-132103
09416262964

[ushadi Micromini]

surajit
dont know about this one

but old english 2-3 hundred yeas ago used to have different use of w, u yu,
s, f, etc... they could not /would not differentiate between these....
like present day bengalis cant differentiate  va, ba, bha of modern devnagari and if v is written to denote va they pronounce it bha....  did you see the latest movie kahaani... devi...debi...vidya    bidya  confusion?

so w or u in  sarpagandha....

ushadi

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:36 PM, surajit koley <surajitno...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Usha di
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[surajit koley]

Thank you Balkar Sir, we also call it SARPAGANDHA in Bengali. We planted those sarpagandha in our school premises and in some of our students' home-yard in 2009. Moreover, those saplings were collected from the wild.

Regards,

Surajit Koley

[surajit koley]

Good morning Usha Di

Yes & No! Yes, we too have one or two of these confusion. Our school is Vidyamandir, while on the other hand we do not say vidya as in normal practice. There is li and la-e-hraswi ! No, i didn't see kahani yet!

Thank you & Regards,

Surajit

[Satish Phadke]

Surajit ji
We had a discussion earlier on this issue. Dear Pankaj kumar ji had answered this query.
I am copy pasting what he had written in the post.


Pankaj Kumar sahani...@gmail.com via googlegroups.com 
11/2/10

to indiantreepix
Just for correction. I realized that the accepted spelling is
Rauvolfia L. and not Rauwolfia L.
WHY?
Because it was named by Linnaeus like that although the name of person
on which the name of taxa was based was Leonhard Rauwolf (also spelled
Rauwolff) [(Augsburg, June 21 in either 1535 or 1540 – September 15,
1596, Waitzen, Hungary) was a German physician, botanist and
traveller].

Rauvolfia Plum. ex L. Sp. Pl. 1: 208. 1753

Regards

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:36 PM, surajit koley <surajitno...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

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Dr Satish Phadke

[surajit koley]

Thank you once again Satish Sir. The mystery behind the names is resolved to the finest level.

Regards,

Surajit

[ushadi Micromini]

Dear Satish and Surajit...
resolved? not really...

or   yes, may be ha ha ...

 but there is NO V in this spelling or two of Dr Leonhard Rauwolf (also spelled
Rauwolff name...

that was the original question, was not it?
Usha di
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Usha di
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[surajit koley]

Good morning Usha Di

Long time ago i read a a few lines about Alfred Nobel stating that he was afraid of mathematics in his childhood and that's why he didn't have any Nobel prize in Mathematics! There was another explanation too!

Don't know if Linnaeus had same experience with the 'W' or not!

Regards,

surajit

[ushadi Micromini]

SURAJIT and if you please lets include Satish and Pankaj in this conversation:

poor mr Linnaeus, 
i am not talking about him, neither the mistake/problem of ENGLISH spelling of proper names his problem, nor could he have started them...
its old English lexicon and use of alphabets...
lets not reduce every problem to him
or any one person  its a widespread, widely used, widely re-created spelling thing...
or may be another european language usage has problem using w for v or vice versa as we see in calcutta...

mr. Linnaeus,  he was a swede  living in the 1700s,   Dr Leonard Rauwolf was a german   (( Leonard Rouwolf is this spelling is in english alphabet as we write it in modern times... Leonard was alive during 1500s and on frontipiece of his own diaries during herbal explorations he writes his own name as Leonarti Rauwol.....with last ff seems to have disappeared..  and french botanist Mr Plumier in 1600s  named a genus Rauvolfia (written now a days as :: genus Rauvolfia Plum. ex L .  and MR Plumier published it in 1700s  or the 18th century  ( I remember  Mr Plumier because of Plumeria or the Kath champa that we all love so much, notice the plumeria named after PLUMIER is spelled differently...  to correctly name it it should be PLUMIERIA  with 2 i s )

so there is no rhyme or reason so far in the language as we see it three centuries later... usage of alphabets and transliteration across continents and countries and between latin, german, french and swedish customary usage of those times  and since it was often written by hand and copied by different hands... spelling errors crept in often...
ask any teacher in Linguistics and Palaeogrphy or paleography and they will give long explanation....  very interesting stuff.


just like I find a or ka written in palm leaf manuscripts many different ways over the centuries...  they are by different persons with their own vagaries of good // bad handwriting habits...

have fun deciphering these...

better yet lets worry about the herbal potential and not the spelling



Usha di

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Usha di
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[surajit koley]

Good evening Usha Di

I can only say You are Great.... amazing, a precious gift to me, to the group, i mean this note.

Regards,

surajit