Taxacom: Tropicos and gender of names

Tue Feb 8 13:15:38 CST 2022

Hi Doug,

As I said in my post I think original spelling would be fine, however I
acknowledge that reverting current names would be ridiculous. It would have
to be a cutoff. The database of current epithets would be no different to a
LAN in a way and be the point of current spellings, it would only affect
new names after that. Reality is we are dealing with Strings, not Ints and
that is part of the problem. You cannot teach a machine to do any more with
strings than a human could do, albeit machine will be faster and not have
its own human error, only the human error programmed into it.

I get there is a lot of history to using gender agreement, makes it hard to
change, I get many have an attachment to it and for obvious reasons, that
are valid. But you want to use machines, fine make the system machine
readable in the best way.

Cheers Scott

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 4:05 PM Douglas Yanega via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> On 2/7/22 8:11 PM, Sharkey, Michael J. wrote:
> > Does all of this discourse not make it obvious that gender agreement
> > is a Victorian era remnant that has no place in modern, machine-read,
> > names? We only need unique identifiers. Complete nonsense. Stick with
> > the original spelling regardless.
>
> Actually, I come to the exact opposite conclusion: that we have machines
> available suggests to me that we should take advantage of technology to
> resolve the dilemma.
>
>
> To use an example close to your home, imagine I'm a braconid taxonomist
> working with the genus Diachasma. I look up Diachasma in the registry
> online, and it says that the genus is neuter. I don't need to go to a
> lexicon, just to the registry. I'm done with that, and it took all of 10
> seconds.
>
>
> I have a species in that genus named dentatum, and I decide that it
> belongs instead in the genus Diachasmimorpha. I look up Diachasmimorpha
> in the registry online, and it says that the genus is feminine. I look
> at the registry for Diachasma dentatum, and it says the species epithet
> is an adjective, and *right there in the registry* it says that the
> alternative spellings are dentatus, dentata, and dentatum.
>
>
> I know exactly how to spell the name after I transfer it to its new
> genus, and it took me maybe 30 seconds total.
>
>
> I also want to transfer Diachasma muliebre into Diachasmimorpha. I look
> it up, and the registry says that this is also adjectival, with
> alternative spellings muliebris, muliebris, and muliebre.
>
>
> It tells me Diachasma silenis is a noun, with no alternative spellings,
> and so on.
>
>
> I don't need to know Latin or Greek, I don't need to research etymology,
> I don't need to see the original papers, I just need to type the name
> into the search engine in the registry. It's trivial.
>
>
> And you know something else, Mike? I personally have already screened
> some 12,000 braconid species names in my own database, each annotated as
> to which ones are adjectives. If I share that database online, that's
> 12,000 names that no braconid researcher like you would ever need to
> *research* again. In fact, I've already personally screened over 200,000
> valid animal names, and have them all databased. If one person can do
> 10% of all existing names in their spare time, then this task is *not*
> going to be that hard to accomplish if people get serious.
>
>
> THAT is what technology is for, to make our lives easier. We *don't*
> want to abandon gender agreement, but to make it trivial to adhere to.
> It's called "having our cake and eating it, too".
>
>
> I will point out that the proposal to revert every name ever published
> back to its original spelling would be the absolute most disruptive
> thing one can possibly advocate. Why? Because many of the oldest taxon
> names, for many of the most well-known taxa, were originally spelled
> differently than they are now, and have been that way for centuries.
> With the exception of lepidopterists, the results of reverting to
> original spellings for all taxa would be *catastrophic* for everyone
> else, suddenly changing the spellings of tens of thousands of names.
> *The scientific community would revolt, and rightly so*. Let's not ever
> bring up that proposal again.
>
>
> It's also absurd to claim that we could "lock in place" all the epithets
> as they are spelled right now. Why? Because in order to do that, we
> would need to have a single, official, permanent online registry that
> contains all organismal names as they are presently spelled. If we
> already *had* such a registry containing all names, then we could use it
> instead to *maintain* gender agreement, as I'm proposing; the only tool
> that would make locking all names in place possible is the *exact same
> tool* that we could use to keep gender agreement viable.
>
>
> Let's stop arguing and just cooperate to build that tool. I've already
> done 10% of it myself, and I'm just doing insect names. There are
> *already* authoritative lists for MANY other taxa, they just need to be
> updated to include genders of genera, and declinability of epithets, to
> be brought up to speed. Let's shut the skeptics up once and for all.
>
>
> Peace,
>
> --
> Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
> Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
> phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
>
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-- 
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Centro de Estudos dos Quelônios da Amazônia - CEQUA
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