Philip, Hugo and all,
I must stand corrected on my earlier post about "cirros" being an
Americanisation. As Philip quotes from HANZAB, the insertion of an
"h" is an error in translation from the Ancient Greek. After looking
at a couple of Attic language sites and running "cirrhos" through
their translators et now looks like words such cirrhosis are also wrong.
There you go, you learn something new every day, but then you have to
find room to cram it in.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
On 14/12/2006, at 10:40 AM, Philip Veerman wrote:
Hello Hugo,
About 20 to 15 years ago I delved into this, certain that
cirrocephalus is correct and that cirrhocephalus makes little sense,
not that I know anything about that language. See HANZAB intro to the
species, that says "but the insertion of the first aitch was
incorrect." Then I don't understand why they persist with the error.
Seems silly to me. Also I noted that most of the early texts used
cirrocephalus and that cirrhocephalus came in later. It then appeared
for no reason that I can think of to have been frequently copied
thereafter. I asked Dr Richard Schodde about it all those years ago
and I'm sure he said he has seen the original description and that
cirrocephalus is the correct spelling. I tried pushing the issue for
a little while but not a lot that can be done with that. I wrote to
Stephen Debus after he did the summary article on the species in Aust
Bird Watcher sort of complaining that he had not clarified the issue
and error as it would have been a good opportunity to do so. Stephen
is normally so reliable and accurate in such things. Maybe he thought
it was not an issue. In a moment of weakness or maybe because I have
not personally seen the real evidence, I too used the wrong spelling
in my Canberra Birds book.
Philip
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