Taxacom: Subject: Re: demystifying gender agreement, was Re: Removals, of offending scientific names

[Leslie Watling]

A couple of days ago, this was written by one of the discussants on this
list:
I would like to add that gender agreement in classical languages is not
"complex" or "confusing". A twelve year old can master it in a few
months time.

And the older we get the longer it takes and the less time we have.....
Most of us nowadays did not take Latin in high school or college. My
daughter did two semesters of college Latin and she has a lot of trouble
trying to figure out what the gender of some particular genus is.

And then this was written:
What bothers me is if taxonomists find it so difficult to work with such
a simple requirement as gender agreement, how can we trust their taxonomic work
which should be far more complex?

Well, let's see. Maybe you can trust my taxonomic work because I have spent
my life working on a certain group and I can identify those organisms
without using literature. Maybe I understand the morphology, molecular
genetics, deep time evolution of the group I work with.

Gender agreement is really a monumental waste of time. It is already
troublesome enough to have to go back into the limited descriptions and
simplistic illustrations to try to decipher what the author thought the
species looked like, a task made worse by the lousy preservation or almost
entire lack of specimen. There are days when I would like to just ignore
the whole bloody thing and decide that that old species name should never
have a modern specimen attached to it and just start fresh. But I don't....
Instead I spend the hours trying to make sense of what was being described
while looking at something recently collected.

So, I may take a wee bit of offense at the suggestion that my taxonomic
work is suspect because I don't want to spend months figuring out the
gender agreement for a new species I would like to describe.

Les

Les Watling
Professor Emeritus
School of Life Sciences
University of Hawaii

Professor Emeritus
School of Marine Sciences
University of Maine