Philip
It has very little to do with gender as you normally think of it. But Latin
and French (that I know of - I think other non-English languages as well)
assign all nouns to a gender of male, female or (in some cases?) neuter.
Nothing to do with the "Sex" of the object - you could have the word for
milkman for example being "feminine" (been too long since I studied French
or Latin so I can't give any real examples). So for example as the
referenced article says - Equus is a masculine Latin noun - whatever the
"sex" of the horse. And so any qualifying adjectives must be masculine.
Complicating this is the fact that some Genus names are made up or of
non-Latin origin!
Hope this helps a little - taking me back lots of years to my schooldays!
Dave
On 5 July 2012 21:20, Philip Veerman <> wrote:
> 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: Re: [Birding-Aus] 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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