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

[Adam Cotton]

On 27/06/2023 00:41, Jared Bernard via Taxacom wrote:
> Thai even has gender specific punctuation. So I would expect that
> taxonomists who speak other languages would be accustomed to such rules.
>
> -Jared Bernard


I have lived in Thailand for over 40 years and speak the language almost 
fluently.

I find Jared's statement rather strange. Thai males and females, both 
adult and children, use different versions of a polite word, equivalent 
to 'yes' in meaning, at the end of a sentence (Krap [male] and Kha 
[female]). There are also different words for the pronoun 'I' depending 
on the speaker. Males use a different polite word to females when 
referring to themselves.

There is no gender agreement between nouns and associated adjectives in 
Thai, because generally nouns are not masculine or feminine. The same 
pronoun 'Khao' is used for he/she/they/him/her/them (people), with a 
different pronoun for animals and objects. There are variants of the 
third person pronoun depending on politeness, but not the gender of the 
person being referred to.

Also there are no changes to a noun to make it plural, which is mainly 
indicated by context or using numbers in combination with the relevant 
'classifying word'. Verbs do not conjugate at all, other than by adding 
a word or words to indicate past or future, equivalent to 'already' and 
'will'. In short, individual words do not change.

All of this and the blurring between whether a word is an adjective or a 
noun (some words can be both, or be used as a verb) makes it very 
difficult for Thais and many other nationalities with their own 
languages which do not conform to Latin/Greek/etc. gender norms to 
understand how to apply gender agreement in nomenclature.

A problem I am very familiar with (especially resulting from a 
particular Chinese work) is incorrectly applying a version of gender 
agreement to species names that are actually nouns, assuming that they 
must be changed so that the ending matches that of the genus (regardless 
of the gender of the genus). These unjustified emendations are repeated 
in many subsequent Chinese publications.

I really think that it is very difficult for most people who are 
non-European based language native speakers to understand the 
complexities of Latin gender agreement and apply it correctly.

I am a lepidopterist and generally agree with most of the comments of 
George and others, except that I think that current prevailing usage 
should be taken into account rather than only uniformly adopting 
original spellings in all cases. Here I am not actually referring to 
gender agreement cases, but names to which article 33.3.1 applies. I 
don't think it is advisable for stability to uniformly revert to 
original spellings for absolutely every name.

Adam.