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

[Douglas Yanega]

On 6/26/23 9:00 AM, Frederick W. Schueler via Taxacom wrote:
>  does anyone have any data on the percentage of generic names that are 
> of ambiguous gender, or specific epithets that are ambiguously 
> adjectives or nouns in apposition?

I have the latter figure, based on sampling over 10% of all valid 
zoological names (>210,000 taxa).

8%

That's the percentage of epithets - *by raw number of occurrences* - 
that can linguistically be either nouns or adjectives. A very high 
proportion of those are names ending in "-cola", "-colus", and "-colum". 
This is the 8% of names that will, even in the best-case scenario, 
require consulting the original description to determine whether or not 
they are adjectival.

Extrapolating, if there are ~2 million valid names, we can expect about 
160,000 names that will require checking the ODs to make sure we know 
whether they should be declinable. A pretty fair number of those have 
already been checked, I expect, though the results of those checks are 
not always made public.

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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