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 !
The two key papers that are widely cited are:
David, N. and Gosselin, M. (2002) The grammatical gender of avian genera.
Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 122: 257-282.
David, N. and Gosselin, M. (2002) Gender agreement of avian species names.
Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 122: 14-49.
I've not read the papers, but agree with the sentiment of the changes:
scientific names aren't just labels, they having meaning. While some
may argue that gender agreement is linguistic nitpicking, others may
argue that whether Little Kingfisher belongs in Ceyx or Alcedo is
taxonomic nitpicking. ;) I'll defer both to the experts.
--
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Paul Taylor Veni, vidi, tici -
I came, I saw, I ticked.
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