birding-aus

BBC story - capitalising bird names

To: Birding-aus <>
Subject: BBC story - capitalising bird names
From: John Leonard <>
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 13:55:41 +1100
"Grammatically this seems correct"...

Sorry to keep banging on about this topic but grammar has nothing to do
with capitalisation or not.

Grammar is a property of the relations between the words of a sentence, not
of their written representation. It would be quite possible to have a
written representation of a grammatical sentence that had no puncutation or
capitalisation at all.

Oh, and I am in favour of capitalising species' names.

John Leonard


On 4 January 2012 13:42, Jeremy O'Wheel <> wrote:

> The Australian Journal of Zoology, and I think most scientific
> journals has this to say in its note to authors;
>
> "Do not use initial capitals for vernacular names of species except
> where the name is based on a proper name (e.g. regent honeyeater, but
> Port Lincoln parrot; sugar glider, but Leadbeater´s possum)."
>
> http://www.publish.csiro.au/nid/93/aid/392.htm#6
>
> Grammatically this seems correct, and I presume explains why the BBC
> and Australian Geographic follow the same convention.
>
> It might be a specific convention amongst birding organisations to
> capitalise common names, but I think it's not a normal convention more
> generally, and I suspect most publishers of more general biology than
> just birds would not follow this convention.  The Oxdord dictionary
> definition of "proper noun" seems to support not capitalising common
> names.
>
> Jeremy
>
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Tony Keene <> wrote:
> > Ah, the tyranny of house styles. A certain institute I used to work at
> had a house style almost incompatible with the sciences and a publishing
> group that really should know better in the chemical sciences produces
> styles that border on the illiterate. As for a response from the BBC, good
> luck. As Ian Hislop once said "the BBC goes from breathtaking arrogance to
> grovelling apology wih nothing inbetween."
> >  One thing sometimes overlooked is that while a species is treated as a
> proper noun, the family is not (so Wonga Pigeon, but a flock of pigeons).
> >  Cheers,
> >
> >  Tony
> >



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Admin

The University of NSW School of Computer and Engineering takes no responsibility for the contents of this archive. It is purely a compilation of material sent by many people to the birding-aus mailing list. It has not been checked for accuracy nor its content verified in any way. If you wish to get material removed from the archive or have other queries about the archive e-mail Andrew Taylor at this address: andrewt@cse.unsw.EDU.AU