[Taxacom] ICBN (orthography of geographical epithets)

[Guido Mathieu]

This makes sense to me. May I rephrase it this way:

When Latinization of a geographical name results in two Latin words, the use of
a hyphen is to be accepted. 'Accepted' means that a hyphen is not mandatory and
that neither its presence nor its absence is a correctable error according to
the current rules. [It might be questionable however whether the acceptability
of two spellings is ideal...].
Ex. flumen-viridis, sancti-johannis, sanctae-ritae.

When a geographical name is not Latinized but taken from its original language
and only given a Latin ending it is considered as one word and the presence of a
hyphen is a correctable error, Ex. rioverdensis, sanjuanensis, santaritana.

According to this the epithet costaricensis (the Spanish name Costa Rica plus a
Latin ending 'ensis'), has to be written without hyphen, hence costa-ricensis is
a correctable error (60.9. Ex.20). When the epithet would consist of the Latin
words for coast and rich it would result in ora-dives in which a hyphen is to be
accepted.

p.s.: In IPNI there are 355 entries with rio- epithets. Many were written with
hyphen but I've noticed that some 6 hours after I launched this matter on
TAXACOM, the hyphens have been removed from all rio- and san- epithets in the
IPNI database. 

Guido


> First of all, this should not be seen in isolation, as Art
> 23.1 also bear on this.
> 
> The name of a species consist of two parts: it is a binary name, or 
> more colloquially: a binomial. However, linguistally it is a sentence 
> in Latin, and should grammatically be a correct Latin sentence. 
> Theoretically, it could consist of an indefinitive number of words but 
> in practice it will consist of two or three words, an example of the 
> latter being Coix lacryma-jobi. Clearly "lacrima" is word, as is the 
> name "Job". In epithets such as the sancti-johannis and 
> sanctae-helenae of Rec 60C.5.d the two components are clearly words 
> that "usually stand independently".
> 
> There are a lot of geographical names that have established Latin 
> equivalents: if this equivalent consists of two words a hyphen is to 
> be accepted.
> 
> Some others can be translated into two Latin words: For a name 
> including "san" this will mean using "sanctus"; for a name including 
> "rio": "flumen". In such cases a hyphen is to be accepted (IPNI lists 
> a Caesalpinia flumen-viridensis).
> 
> If latinization involves no more than affixing a ending to a non-Latin 
> word then this a different matter. I have not looked at any real cases 
> but I doubt if there will be many where a hyphen is appropriate.
> 
> Paul

>> ICBN Art. 60.9. says: 'The use of a hyphen in a compound epithet is 
>> treated as an error to be corrected by deletion of the hyphen, unless 
>> the epithet is formed of words that usually stand independently..."
>> 
>> How do we have to understand 'usually'? In which context 
>> (grammatically versus geographically)?
>>
>> Guido