Taxacom: Tropicos and gender of names

Tue Feb 8 10:36:44 CST 2022

Currently I follow gender agreement as it is required and is not something
herpetology opts out of but I will admit it is the only reason. This is not
because I am english speaking (natively) and don't get it. Eu também falo
português, morando no Brasil. I also get that to people who do genuinely
sense incorrect gender it feels weird when you have it wrong, me saying
obrigada instead of obrigado as a male is just weird, just like saying "a
apple" instead of "an apple" for english speakers. All languages have these
types of rules in places even if it's not gender in English which
historically did have gender but got rid of it.

However, taking off my biologist or linguist hat for a moment. As a
computer programmer having designed databases, mostly in SQL I think there
are a lot of valid reasons to be rid of gender agreement and just use
original spelling. Mostly these come down to the accuracy of pick up by
databases of these issues. It is one aspect that could be avoided making
all databases far more accurate and with simpler rules. It should be
remembered that as I was taught when I did software engineering, a computer
program is a recipe designed for a 3 year old, the computer may be faster
than us, but do not equate that to more intelligent. Famous movie quote, it
just runs programs. The computer cannot make any decision it is not told to
make. Therefore if we want high speed and excruciatingly accurate data
reading by these databases, then we should be making it easier for
databases to read and process data, not harder. Gender assignment is one
area we could be rid of without taking anything of value away from
nomenclature. The important thing in nomenclature is that we have a unique
binomen for each species, and other higher taxa also, sometimes lower.
Personally I do not see the tradeoff of accuracy because of gender a worthy
tradeoff. I think this is something we can recognise for the sake of
convenience of having databases that can do the work for us, and do it
well. The more complex the rules you put in to the data read, the more
chances that the computer will do exactly what its told, and that will be
opposite of what we intend. The computer only knows what we told it to do,
it has no concept of our intentions, or the nuances of language.

So yes I for one think gender should be removed and we just use original
spelling, it will save a lot of headaches.

Cheers Scott

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 1:14 PM David Campbell via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 4:49 AM Richard Pyle via Taxacom <
> taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> > I'm not going to dive into this thread too deeply, but I will say that
> > using text-string scientific names as unique identifiers for computers is
> > not a viable proposition.  Perhaps it made sense back in the previous
> > century (pre-2000), but the idea of consistent scientific-name text
> strings
> > for use as computer database identifiers is now long gone.
> >
> > The reality is that alternate spellings already exist in both paper and
> > electronic form, so the job of the database is to track the variants and
> > cross-link them. Think of scientific names more as "finding aids", rather
> > than identifiers. It's not the case that we need to standardize on
> > scientific name spellings in order to make our databases work; rather,
> our
> > databases should be designed to obviate the need for consistent spelling.
> > In other words, in the modern computer era, we should be aiming for a
> > paradigm where gender agreement (or abandonment thereof) is irrelevant to
> > accessing electronic information cross-linked to scientific names.  I
> think
> > we're getting close to achieving that paradigm.
> >
> > Aloha,
> > Rich
> >
> >
> This is also critical to catching misspellings, which happen whether or not
> gender agreement is used.  Of course, catching these properly will require
> something more sophisticated than "these names are similar so they must be
> the same"; databases are known to impose wrong corrections of this sort.
>
> Given that gender agreement is in use, it is necessary to recognize names
> that only differ by the gender ending as homonyms (in the non-technical
> sense of treated as the same spelling; they could be variants of the same
> name as well as homonyms in technical Code terms).  There are also examples
> of incorrectly making things agree in gender, and cases that are not
> clearly addressed by the current ICZN Code (don't know on botany).
>
> A special case of non-code compliant changing a noun to agree in gender is
> when the noun actually conveys Latin gender.  Unlike mistakenly assuming
> that cylindrellus is an adjective, this happens in instances such as
> species names ending in -tor and -trix, e.g. viator ("male traveller")
> versus viatrix ("female traveller").  As nouns, they do not change to match
> a change in genus.
>
> A different sort of non-code compliant change is based on the argument that
> the gender does not match biological reality, e.g., the historic argument
> to change the snail genus Viviparus to Vivipara because females, not males,
> give birth to live young.
>
> A complication not yet addressed in the Code is how to handle mistakes in
> gender form of honorifics, of the -i/-ae/-orum variety.  If an author
> clearly identifies the honoree, but uses the incorrect ending, must the
> ending be corrected?  If not, can one have palmeri and palmerae
> nomenclaturally valid in the same genus, named for the same person?
>
> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> Associate Professor, Geology
> Department of Natural Sciences
> 110 S Main St, #7270
> Gardner-Webb University
> Boiling Springs NC 28017
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-- 
Scott Thomson

Centro de Estudos dos Quelônios da Amazônia - CEQUA
Petrópolis, Manaus
State of Amazonas, 69055-010
Brasil

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