Taxacom: demystifying gender agreement ( was Re: Removals of offending scientific names)

[Douglas Yanega]

I'm back from lunch and have a little more time to respond to George 
Beccaloni's comment that adhering to gender agreement rules is "irritating".

First, I actually agree - but only to a point, and only in a certain 
context.

That context is one which would seem to be what George was describing; 
one in which an individual taxonomist, operating solely with their own 
"at hand" resources to guide them, is confronted with a situation where 
the only way forward is for them to PERSONALLY decide which species 
names must be changed, and how to change them.

In that very specific context, I *absolutely* agree that adhering to 
gender agreement is not just irritating, but a time-consuming burden, 
potentially necessitating deep dives into obscure grammatical and 
linguistic "rabbit holes", and sometimes not even leading to clear and 
objective answers. This is a terrible and unfair burden for taxonomists, 
who generally have better things they can be doing with their time.

That being said, the difficulty is - as I noted before - not something 
INHERENT in gender agreement. The problem is the concept that every 
taxonomist has to make these decisions, and do the research, and worry 
about linguistics, BY THEMSELVES. It does not need to be this way, and I 
feel it SHOULD not be this way. We can do better, and make it so the 
process is no longer irritating.

There are two things that can free individual taxonomists from the 
irritation and burden of complying with gender agreement while *still 
allowing* gender agreement to continue as a practice - a practice which 
is, in fact, essential to nomenclatural stability.

(1) The first thing is, as I said, designing our digital 
taxonomic/nomenclatural resources so they are "intelligent" enough to be 
able to perform *one* *incredibly simple task*: matching a gender entry 
in one field (a genus-linked field) with another gender entry in an 
"alternative spelling of species name" field. Basically, if the genus 
entry is listed as "Feminine", e.g., then it links to and displays the 
"Feminine" spelling variant for any species name linked to that genus. 
We *can* do this, and there are a number of existing resources that 
*already* do. That's the *easy* part to demystify.

(2) The second thing comes naturally to most people's minds when they 
are told they could automate gender agreement: "That doesn't tell me 
which names to enter in the database as having variable spellings, and 
which names only can ever have one spelling, nor does it tell me which 
genus names are which genders." This is a more significant issue, and I 
freely admit that an actual solution is not going to be simple. However, 
a solution is possible, and I think it is highly desirable, and maybe 
even necessary. Namely, we create two resources: a single master 
registry of all available genus-rank names *that includes their genders 
*(as established by the rules in the Code), plus a single standard 
adjectival lexicon that indicates which species names (or name suffixes) 
are ALWAYS adjectival with variant spellings, and which names are in the 
very small subset that can be *either* nouns or adjectives depending on 
whether the coining author explicitly specified the etymology (with, for 
each such name, an appropriate default). Any name *not* listed in the 
lexicon would be treated as having invariant spelling.

The rationale for having a single master registry of genus names is to 
prevent disputes and debates and - most importantly - redundancy of 
effort. There is no reason for hundreds of taxonomists to have to 
independently research the gender of a genus name. The sensible thing to 
do is to compile a list from existing resources, and have a small group 
of Code-conversant people review all of the disputable names on the 
list, and resolve all those disputes permanently. Make the list public, 
and permanent.

The rationale for a single standard lexicon is basically the same: to 
put an end to confusion, indecision, and controversy, as well as 
redundancy of effort. For example, in Latin, the word "alba" is both a 
noun and an adjective, but in the history of nomenclature, it has only 
ever been used as an adjective (to my knowledge). This should not be 
subject to debate or revisionism: "alba", "albus", and "album" should 
all be treated as adjectives EVEN IF the coining author happened, by 
some miracle, to have explicitly stated otherwise. Otherwise, things 
would be too confusing, given how common these epithets are in both 
plants and animals. This decision should only need to be made once, not 
subject to "second-guessing", and made fully public and adhered to by 
all taxonomists. It's a burden for an individual taxonomist to have to 
look through two books and five online resources to figure out whether 
"alba" is a noun or an adjective, but it's trivial if they only need to 
look at a SINGLE resource, type in the name "alba", and be told 
*unambiguously* that for nomenclature it is an adjective, and ONLY an 
adjective, AND what the alternative spellings are.

The important point I would like to make, for those of you who are 
rolling your eyes or shaking your heads, is that we are actually not 
that far from being able to compile a master list of the genders of all 
available genus names - uBio alone has an almost complete list, for 
example, though lacking gender designations - and the number of 
disputable cases is a very small subset of that total, so assigning each 
genus name a definitive *and irrevocable* gender is entirely feasible. 
The overwhelming majority of genus names are unambiguously assignable 
under the Code. We are, admittedly, not as close to having a list of all 
existing adjectival species names, but there *are* exhaustive digital 
lexicons of Latin and Greek adjectives that could be adapted to our 
needs. The subset of those terms that are disputable under the Code is 
perhaps a bit larger, but still not entirely unmanageable. I've spent 
over 10 years going over the names of insects, and out of over 200,000 
valid insect species-rank names, only about 8% are disputable, and a 
*very* high percentage of those are duplicates (e.g., 1100 of the 16000 
disputable names I have recorded are those ending in "-cola", "-colus", 
or "-colum"). So, even this particular task, of an "official list" of 
species names, is attainable.

The bottom line is that I would ask people to reconsider their 
opposition to gender agreement, if the only reasons you oppose it are 
the issues that would be resolved by having access to the resources 
described above.

Specifically, if the scenario I describe were to become reality - having 
smarter databases, and being provided with official lists - are there 
people here who would *still* advocate that we reject gender agreement? 
If so, why?

Sincerely,

-- 
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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