Sent to the Chat Line with the approval of Leo.
Bill Hall
Subject: Painted Honeyeater names
Hello Bill and John
The discussion Bill started about the name of the Painted Honeyeater piqued my interest. So I thought I’d write and make a few notes using the online resources I have been able to lay my hands on from here at home at
the start of the Christmas break.
Gould named the bird in 1837 from among specimens more or less pouring into Europe from places like Australia. This was before he had even been to Australia. He named it
Entomophila picta in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of 1837. Note then that it was not named
picta by “Whoever chose the name Grantiella” as John suggested, but we’ll get to that below. Then, a year later, still before he had been to Australia, in his 1838 Synopsis of the Birds of Australia, he illustrated just the head of the species
and gave a brief description, as he did for all the birds in that work. But the actual naming traces to 1837 and Gould.
I have dug out the 1837 article and see that Gould gave no explanation as to why he chose
picta instead of any other name. Remember that he was naming many Australian birds at the time. The 1837 article involved, for example, named many. Usually the basic make-up of a scientific name Gould used was pretty clear e.g., haematonotus as red back
for the Red-rumped Parrot or melanocephala as black head for the Noisy Miner, and note that sometimes these names are more properly thought of as Latinized Greek. It is somewhat of an oversimplification, if not an error, to say that scientific names are Latin.
They are Latin or they are Latinized from some other language. But we’ll come back to that too.
The name picta was just one more name that Gould had to come up with among the many he pumped out in those years. So I guess the first part of the answer to your question is that when English speaking ornithologists
in Australia got around to using English names, I can only surmise that they took Painted from the scientific name
picta because all the other things that might have sprung to mind like Pink-billed, or Yellow-winged, or Black Backed or White-bellied were either taken or thought not to be very helpful. Nor is Painted, you might say, but I guess we’d have to dig into
more literature. Whatever the reason, its link to picta is clear enough and the same goes for other birds like the Painted Tiger-Parrot.
Then, in 1911, Gregory Matthews entered the story. He realised that
Entomophila, which Gould had applied to many Australian honeyeaters, had been taken up elsewhere in Zoology in 1824, and as that pre-dated Gould’s use of it, which would have first been around 1836 or 1837 when Gould started naming Australian birds,
it could not be used for Australian honeyeaters. That is why no Australian honeyeaters have
Entomophila as their generic name today. So, Matthews chose (a) to put the Painted Honeyeater in its own genus and (b) to name that genus
Grantiella. It is apparently not as clear as John suggests that Mathews named it after Robert Grant. Ian Fraser favours the notion that it was named after William Robert Ogilvie-Grant, a very different person. Check out Ian’s argument in the book you
were recommended to get hold of for Christmas. He actually points out that the case for it being named after Ogilvie-Grant was made as long ago as 1917.
Now we get to Grantiella. Why Matthews made it a diminutive and feminine, I do not know. I have looked up the 1911 paper where he did it and, somewhat characteristically, gives no reason. Maybe he did in his
later works but I’ll leave that for now as I am off work and the references I might check may not be online but they are at the office. I wonder if it was for little more than euphony, to make the word easy and pleasing to say. In researching this reply
I did find a recommendation as distinct from a Rule endorsed by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature, who publish the Code of Zoological Nomenclature (see below) that names should be euphonious (see attached). Or maybe Matthews
was trying to avoid using a generic name of masculine gender so that there would be no need to change
picta to pictus. I am not sure that Matthews was ever that careful or thoughtful with such things but he chose a name meaning “Grant’s little bird” and that’s kind of all that matters until someone can show that it is not valid and available by
the Rules of Zoological Nomenclature. It is just a name – that is something that gets forgotten too in scientific nomenclature. It may be dumb and silly and stupid that we have to call Laughing Kookaburras
Dacelo novaeguineae or Green Rosellas of Tasmania Platycercus caledonicus but that is how the Rules of nomenclature dictate the way to go and that’s that until they change.
Which brings me to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The rules for forming genus names and species names are pretty clear, if a little arcane and complicated, but they are all set out very clearly in
the Code, which is online at
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted-sites/iczn/code/ Have a skim of Article 30 in Chapter 7, or Article 42.4 in Chapter 9, for example. People do make mistakes and get things wrong – I know I have and I have had to correct my mistakes - by the Rules of the Code,
that is true, but the Code sets out how to resolve things.
Now the Code was not in use back when Gould and Matthews were operating but it sets out how we make, form and apply names, and even how we apply those names introduced a long time ago. It even has separate rules and conditions
for names introduced before 1930 and all of that, as is the purpose of the Code itself, is designed to stabilize nomenclature. The
Emblema story, for example, is as outlined by John, and is within the rules of the Code. An article published a few years back, “Gender agreement of avian species names”, by Normand David and Michele Gosselin in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists
Club explains many of these cases; my favourite is why the Galah is properly known as
Eolophus roseicapilla and not Eolophus roseicapillus. At 15 MB I refrained from attaching it but if you want a copy let me know. Another favourite of mine is that we know Gouldian Finches scientifically as
Erythrura gouldiae because Gould named it with the feminine gouldiae after his wife Elizabeth! I have always rather uncharitably suspected he knew it would perpetuate his own name a little more than had he called it elizabethae.
I guess one last thing is worth coming back to is just to remind that scientific names are of course not always actual Latin as used back in the Forum. Very often they are Latinized Greek or Latinized anything. A great
example from Australian palaeontology is Muttaburrasaurus or just about any scientific name involving someone’s name. How about
Barnardius zonarius parkeri!!!
But I will leave it at that and make a cup of tea! I hope that I have helped clarify a few things for you both. I don’t know whether you want to share all of this with the COG chatline. Might be too much detail for
the readers there!
Cheers
Leo
Dr Leo Joseph
Director
Australian National Wildlife Collection
National Research Collections Australia, CSIRO
GPO Box 1700
Canberra ACT 2601
Australia
Phone: + 61 (0)2 6242 1689
Fax: + 61 (0)2 6242 1688
Email:
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