I understand about the idea of matching the "gender" between the 2 or 3
words. I see it would apply equally to species, as well as sub species
names. However I for one, can't understand who or how anyone decides or
identifies what is the "gender" of the noun word (I assume this usually or
always is the genus name) to start with. I assume many genus names were
given historically after the concept of what is male and female was maybe
not assigned. This is probably way too complicated to explain and probably
way off topic but I wonder is there a simple answer? A quick look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature
and scrolling to the section on Gender Alignment doesn't really help me,
apart from saying with an example on butterflies, that maybe there is no
clear agreement or reason for this.
Philip
-----Original Message-----
From:
On Behalf Of Dave Torr
Sent: Wednesday, 4 July 2012 3:17 PM
To: Carl Billingham
Cc: Birding Aus
Subject: Latin sub-species names - why the change
inendings?
Basically it is all to do with gender - not of the bird but the name. in
Latin nouns can be male or female and the describing adjective (which is
what the subspecies bit is) must match the gender - and typically this
involves changing an -us or -um to -a or vice versa. Look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclaturean
dscroll
down to Gender Alignment for a better explanation. IOC are just correcting
some errors (or introducing new ones!)
On 4 July 2012 15:11, Carl Billingham <> wrote:
> I'm too young/common to have had the classical education so I flounder
> a bit with Latin;-)
>
> I have noticed that the new IOC list has changed a couple of the
> endings on sub-species names. For example with the Shy Heathwren,
> cauta to cautus and halmaturina to halmaturinus. Yet the same endings
> haven't changed for other birds such as Little Wattlebird on Kangaroo
> Island are still ssp halmaturina. Can somebody please explain what
> the difference is and what the rule is for whether they should end
> with an 'a' or 'us'. Thanks in advance, Carl
> ===============================
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