Horsetails, clubmosses and spikemosses
selaginella
say sel-a-ji-NELL-uh
Selaginella kraussiana
The spikemosses. Six syllables, one soft g that has no business being soft, and a doubled l you cannot hear.
What it is
The plant
Selaginella kraussiana is a low creeping plant from southern and eastern Africa, grown under glass and in terrariums for its flat fresh green mats. The leaves are tiny and scale-like, set in four ranks along branching stems, and the whole plant lies almost flat against the ground. It is not a moss and not a fern, but a spikemoss, and it reproduces by spores of two different sizes.
Why
Why the letters and the sound disagree
A diminutive built on Selago, a plant name Pliny used for something clubmoss-like. Latin makes a diminutive by adding -ella, so Selaginella is the little selago. Two things in that ending catch people out: the doubled l belongs to the suffix and is never pronounced twice, and the g in front of it is said as a j although Latin would have kept it hard.
Recorded
Spellings people arrive at
- selagginellaa doubled consonantNo.
- selaginelaone sound, two lettersTwo, at the end.
- sellaginellaa doubled consonantThe first l is single.
- selajinellasoft gBecause English softens g before i, and never respells it.
- selaginnellaa doubled consonantThe only doubled letter in selaginella is the ll.
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