Hi all
This illustrates one of my pet hates about scientific names: they are
just that, scientific names. They may be Latin, Greek or coined, so my
contention is why does the specific name have to follow the gender of
the generic ? I think it would be much more sensible to leave the
specific name alone once allocated & ignore any gender agreement
because the name is scientific !
We certainly would not have the mess over Little Kingfisher. If Temmick
named it Ceyx pusilla, then so be it. The genus might change, but leave
the specific alone.
Cheers
Geoff Bowen
Norwich UK
on my way to Oz tomorrow evening !
Carl Clifford wrote:
That would be right. I just ran pusilla and pusillus
through a couple of on-line Latin dictionarys, and pusillus is the male
adjective. Looks like Temmink was not as good at Latin as he thought I
am sticking with pusillus.
Carl Clifford
On 31/10/2008, at 2:26 PM, m("ozemail.com.au","birder");"> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 02:06:06PM +1100, Carl Clifford wrote:
Call it whatever you like, because whichever
name you use, someone
will say you are wrong.
My knowledge of Latin is mostly limited to what I learnt from Monty
Python's "Life of Brian", but I remember reading in C&B 2008 that
similar name changes are due to Latin grammatical gender.
According to Wikipedia, Ceyx was "the son of Eosphorus and the king
of Thessaly", so presumably the genus name is also masculine.
That would make "C. pusillus" the technically correct specific name
- "pusilla" should be feminine. (However there are some exceptions
e.g. "nauta" - sailor - is masculine.)
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