italicization of family names

[Curtis Clark]

At 07:40 AM 11/16/98 -0700, JOSEPH E. LAFERRIERE wrote:
>There is of course a logical inconsistency inherit
>in all of this. If you ask the question of why
>scientific names are italicized, the answer usually
>is that they are foreign words and words in a foreign
>language are traditionally italicized. But family
>and ordinal and class names are every bit as Latin
>as generic and specific names. And I have never seen
>anyone italicize the latin diagnosis of a new name.

The diagnosis part is typographically consistent: Latin is the language of
the diagnosis, so it is not italicized (nor should binomials in a diagnosis
be italicized, but a non-Latin word, if one should occur, *should* be
italicized).

In the case of family names (and I assume the same thing goes for other
supragenerics), one could make the point that families were traditionally
named in the language of the country (e.g. Papaveraceen, papaverac=E9es), an=
d
that families are spelled the same in English as in Latin. It is a silly
argument, but possibly true. :-)

Keep in mind, too, that italicizing names and phrases in a foreign language
is a typographic convention of English; other languages may have different
traditions.=20


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