help educating employer

[Curtis Clark]

At 08:29 AM 09/10/96 -0700, JOSEPH E. LAFERRIERE wrote:
>1) Is the double-i rule based on Classical Latin? How would
>Pliny the Elder have translated "Schott's Yucca?"

Yes. Dan Nicolson wrote a very succinct article about this in Taxon maybe 20
years ago. Standard practice in the Middle Ages was to latinize names of men
in the fashion of Roman family names of important families, Thus, Clark
would become Clarkius, LaFerriere Laferriereus, Schott Schottius, Turner
Turnerus, etc.; -ius for names ending in a consonant except "r", -us for
everything else. The only correct Latin genitives of these examples are
Clarkii, Laferrierei, Schottii, and Turneri. One could conceivably latinize
the names otherwise, but any system that accepts "Clarkia" as a feminized
generic name logically must accept "clarkii" as a genitive. Pliny antedates
this practice, and most likely would have regarded "Schott" as a barbarism,
but if faced with Schottius, would have called the plant "Yucca schottii".

>2) Is he correct in his assertion below that the trend in
>zoology has been in the opposite direction?

Who cares? Last I looked, Yucca schottii was a plant.

>3) Can the case be made that zoologists are using faulty
>Latin by using a single i?

Absolutely. That's their privilege, as long as they stick to animals.

[the boss's response:]
>   It seems a bit odd that botany uses ii for words that
>are supposed to be based on Latin. This does not seem
>reasonable regarding pronunciation considering modern Latin-
>derived languages such as Spanish that never double vowels
>in one word.

I seem to remember a Gaviidae among the animals. The Spanish connection is
not really relevant; modern English no longer uses the letter "thorn" that
was common in Old English, and we pronounce "g" before "e" or "i" as if it
were a "j", not a "y".

When I see references that consistently screw up scientific names, I
automatically discount the rest of the scholarship that went into the work,
since, as I say to my students, there's no real trick to copying the correct
spelling from a flora. Your boss does a disservice to the entire effort by
forcing the inclusion of what are fundamentally spelling errors.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Clark                       http://www.is.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department                     Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona    FAX:   (909) 869-4396
Pomona CA 91768-4032  USA                          jcclark at csupomona.edu