Fwd: Re: PhyloCode prefix/suffix?

[Curtis Clark]

At 04:47 AM 10/26/00, Philip Cantino wrote:
>People
>opposed marking PhyloCode names with a symbol unless names governed
>by rank-based nomenclature are also marked in some way, which of
>course the PhyloCode has no control over.

They are, at least in most languages: They are italicized. Phylocode names
could do well to *not* be italicized.

>The symbol I proposed at the time was the Greek letter phi (for
>phylogenetic), but I much prefer the exclamation mark.  The principal
>problem with using phi is that it is not present on keyboards and
>takes some searching to find in common word-processing programs; it
>may not even be possible to make the phi symbol in some programs.

Funny, I had thought of phi, too. But the biggest issue with it is
character encoding and interconvertibility. Someone using Windows, or Mac
with Microsoft Office, might use the Symbol font to type it, but someone
without the font would see "F" or "f". Using Windows NT or Apple X, one
might use the Greek range in Unicode, which is the ideal long-term
solution, but a Greek using an older version of either system would use a
Greek codepage, and someone using a Cyrillic alphabet might use the
Cyrillic phi, which encodes to still a different place. And a TeX user
might use the codes to place a mathematical symbol. The end result of all
this is that Phylocode names would require processing every time a
manuscript containing them was converted from one system to another, and
the processing would not be algorithmic (i.e., someone would have to look
to see how phi was encoded).

The exclamation mark is much less ambiguous. The only symbol that might be
confused with it is the Unicode U+01C3 LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK, and
even the people who often type !Kung are likely to use the exclamation mark
instead. In an ideal world (IMO), !Kung botanists would publish
phylogenetic studies in their own language, and possibly run into problems,
but I imagine by then that they will have diverged the appearance of U+01C3
and the exclamation mark in their fonts.

Of course with Ken's concern at the proliferation of names, we might append
the mark; e.g. Asteraceae! = sunflowers factorial. :-)


--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department             Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University      FAX: (909) 869-4078
Pomona CA 91768-4032  USA                  jcclark at csupomona.edu