Taxacom: Taxacom| Genus name question

[Stephen Thorpe]

11.8. Genus-group names

A genus-group name (see also Article 10.3) must be a word of two or more letters and must be, or be treated as, a noun in the nominative singular.
TREATED AS
    On Saturday, 22 January 2022, 10:11:11 am NZDT, John Grehan via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:  
 
 I would be interested to have input on judging the validity of the name
'Magnificus' which was proposed by a Chinese worker back in 2000 for a
genus of Hepialidae. The author made no reference to the basis of the name
(although the moths are quite nice looking and so perhaps it is an allusion
to this aspect).

Under current rules, is the name valid? I had a colleague make the
following comments:

"The problem seems to centre on the use by taxonomists of eighteenth
century "modern" Latin, as used for learned discourse, all a bit mixed up
with medieval liturgical Latin from the Roman church.

In these branches of Latin it seems likely that as in classical Latin,
magnficus is not a noun.

So I can see two "legal" positions, from the ICZN point of view.

Generic names must be nouns. Magnificus is not by any stretch of
imagination a noun. As a generic name it is therefore invalid.
Magnificus has appeared in the lit as a generic name. As generic names are
nouns, this act has by definition converted Magnificus into a noun for
taxonomic usages.

If this ([2]) sounds a bit stretched, consider that many generic names are
purely artificial. They were not nouns or anything until they appeared in
the biological literature. So I could make up a name like Rumblustumblus
(Rumble us, tumble us). It's hard to maintain that it's not a generic name:
for biological purposes it's now a noun!

The literature is full of prank names, most of them of course specific.  In
fact various kinds of pranking go all the way back to Linnaeus)."

I hope (wish) to get sufficient clarity to determine if it is absolutely
necessary to replace the Magnificus' name or not.

Also, why was the rule made that the original word used for a genus have to
be a noun? In that respect there is a  name 'Viridigigas" but neither green
or giant are nouns as such. But what do I know?

John Grehan
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