help educating employer

[John McNeill]

On 10 September, Dennis Paulsen wrote:

>And whether some zoologists have dropped the second 'i' or not, it's a
>bit shocking to me that your employer considers his own judgment to
>supercede the rules of botanical nomenclature!

On the assumption that "the boss" is a zoologist, it is even more
shocking to me is that he considers his own judgment to supersede the
rules of ZOOLOGICAL nomenclature - shich require retention of the
original spelling, where, as Dennis Paulsen notes, there are many -ii
endings as well as -i ones.

Readers may be interested in what the Draft BioCode suggests in this
regard (Art. 37 - esp. 37.8 and 37.9).  There, a solution is envisaged
similar to your boss's one, in that a standardised orthography is
proposed (so that one does not have to remember which is -i and which
-ii, and perhaps also which are, say, _sylvatica_ and which
_silvatica_ though that is not yet part of the BioCode proposals).  It
differs, however, in that it WOULD be part of the international rules,
and it WOULD be based (we assume) on a combination of actual
preponderacy of usage coupled with grammatical consistency.

As many commentators have said, the Latin grammar is less important
than the consistency that following rules achieves.

John McNeill

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From: John McNeill, Director, Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen's Park,
      Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2C6, Canada.
      Tel.: 416-586-5639      Fax: 416-586-8044
      e-mail: johnm at rom.on.ca
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