Taxacom: Latin

[George Beccaloni]

What a complete waste of time having to go into all of that for zero
practical benefits. Let's just be allowed to focus on taxonomy and science,
not ancient languages and deities, like arcane necromancers! I have yet to
hear a really good reason why we should retain gender agreement.  Gender
agreement does not help with stability as I think Doug stated - in fact it
wastes valuable time and hinders communication. I bet few large electronic
names catalogues contain information about the gender of the genus-group
names in them. Mine don't and going back and adding this useless
information would be arduous in the extreme, as one would really need to
check the original descriptions to do a good job. That would be a massive
task - LepIndex has more than 20,000 genus-group names. Personally I think
it very unlikely that the gender of more than a small fraction of all
published animal genus-group names will be available in electronic form in
the foreseeable future. People who haven't worked on large databases of
scientific names think that an army of little unpaid elves will somehow
make all this information freely available in the near future, but I would
be very surprised if that transpires.

Best wishes,

George


****************************************************************************
*Dr George Beccaloni FLS*
*Director, Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project*

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On Tue, 27 Jun 2023 at 11:28, lynn <lynn at afriherp.org> wrote:

> It is a false argument that you need to learn Latin to be able to use
> gender agreement, there are many Latin dictionaries available that usually
> have detailed information about the grammar. As well as Stearn’s Botanical
> Latin already mentioned there is also Brown’s excellent book on the
> Composition of Scientific Words (both available online at archive.org).
> I have all these as well as English, German, French, Greek and Spanish
> dictionaries amongst several other books covering scientific etymology.
> Even the ICZN website has detailed information available. I think that
> those who reject gender agreement are basically making a mountain out of a
> molehill.
> Lynn
>
> > On 26 Jun 2023, at 22.41, George Beccaloni via Taxacom <
> taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Just proves my point - so 90% do not offer Latin, and no doubt only a
> > fraction of those pupils at the 10% of schools which do offer it,
> actually
> > take it. Since taxonomy is a global endeavor, the question is (as I said
> in
> > my original message), what proportion of students in the entire world
> take
> > Latin. I am sure it is much less than 1%. I went to schools on 3
> > continents (including the USA) and none offered Latin. I would have been
> > interested as I started collecting and studying butterflies from the age
> of
> > 10 and wanted to know more about scientific names.
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> > George
> >
> ****************************************************************************
> > *Dr George Beccaloni FLS*
> > *Director, Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project*
> >
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> >
> ****************************************************************************
> >
> >
> >> On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 at 21:33, Richard Jensen <rjensen at saintmarys.edu>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Do you live in isolation?  About 10% of US high schools offer Latin. so
> >> hundreds (thousands?) of students take it every year..  I had Latin and
> >> Spanish in high school and the former certainly helped with the latter!
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> Richard J
> >>
> >> --
> >> Richard Jensen, Professor Emeritus
> >> Department of Biology
> >> Saint Mary's College
> >> Notre Dame, IN 46556
> >>
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> >
> > Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for
> about 36 years, 1987-2023.
>