I am intrigued by the pronunciation for the adjective for squirrel, "sciurine".
In Wiktionary, the pronunciation in IPA is '/ˈsaɪjʊɹaɪn/' ('/ˈsʌɪjᵿrʌɪn/' in the OED online), which strikes me as odd as I (a non-zoologist) would have read it '/ˈʃuːɹaɪn/' as if it were Italian (my second language) —like shoe in proscuitto, noy sigh-yoo. All autogenerated sites seem to have this, although I am guessing they parsed few common sources or worse are autogenerated so that does not imply validity. Related are the various taxa involving squirrels, like Sciuromorpha, but neither the Wikipedia page or the discussion page talks about pronunciation.
The word science is unambiguously pronounced '/ˈsaɪəns/', but fascia is pronounced '/ˈfeɪʃə/' and conscious '/ˈkɒnʃəs/'. The Bayer designation for stars in the constellation Pisces ('/ˈpaɪsiːz/') have genitive Piscium (example), which I'd guess would be pronounced similarly ('/ˈpaɪsijʌm/') to Pisces.
Obviously, few would know the word so its usage in most contexts would just cause confusion and the dictionary does dictate how one may choose to pronounce a word. This is just a nagging curiosity of mine.
So my questions would be in the line of:
- Do zoologist, if they even use the term, say?
- Is the '/ˈsaɪjʊɹaɪn/' pronunciation at all natural and unambiguous?
- Is there any similar word I am missing?
- And if not, how trustworthy are online IPA transcriptions?
