[Taxacom] ICZN Opinion 105

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

Dick,

Recently there has been a discussion in the [iczn-list] mailing list, 
an English native speaker proposed to compose a short guide for 
establishing new names, and insisted on including a bullet point that 
the pronounciation of the new name should be specified, in the 
form "see-men-kya-vitch". It took long time to convince him that the 
unclear pronounciation of written new words is only a very special 
problem of the English language, and that in most other languages the 
pronounciation of an unknown new word is clear from the spelling.

The Code cannot give a definition for "easily memorable", but the 
quality of a name in this sense can be tested by trying to find 
the name in GBIF, globalnames or other data aggregators, where 
you can see and count the many different ways such a name has 
subsequently be misspelled since it was established. 

The correlation between length of a name and the number of recorded 
misspellings could also be researched by this method. I would 
generally predict a relationship "the longer the name the higher the 
likelihood for misspellings, and the higher the number of recorded 
different spellings in GBIF".

Selecting a name that will be easily misspelled will provide 
obstacles to future scientists who need to find information published 
on the species.

Francisco



University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org