Taxacom: Latin

Tue Jun 27 17:59:11 CDT 2023

I have followed this debate with some interest. I note that practically all
arguments I have seen presented so far are exclusively from the perspective
of taxonomists, but we must also take into account all of the users of
taxonomy as well. To non-taxonomists, changes to species epithets following
genus changes are often totally mystifying, and sometimes downright
annoying. In several cases I know, the users of the names have simply
failed or refused to update. For example, *Paroedura picta*, a gecko used
as a model organism for developmental biology, is frequently referred
to as *Paroeudra
pictus *in the literature and in the pet trade*—*a holdover from the
original name, *Diplodactylus pictus* Peters, and incorrect gender
assignment of *Paroedura* when it was first moved to that genus in 1994
(remedied in 1995! but the damage was done)*. S*ome even call them 'pictus
geckos', using the original spelling in the common name. We are making life
harder not just for ourselves, but also for the biological community at
large, when trivial names themselves change spelling as a result of
reclassification.

So far, I have seen a lot of strong arguments for the discontinuation of
gender agreement (at least as a rule), expressed by several members of the
community, especially George Beccaloni and Scott Thompson. To summarise
these briefly:
(1) As above: it is very inconvenient for everyone who is not a taxonomist
and doesn't understand the intricacies
(2) It makes tracing names in the literature challenging, necessitating the
use of wildcards or stem-based variants. This might be fine for those of us
with experience, but for young students, and for non-taxonomists, these
kinds of steps are often overlooked or not understood, and they
consequently miss swathes of literature. And even for those of us with
experience, it adds a step, costing us time.
(3) We do not have definitive lists yet of all the genera that have been
described, and we are still further from the existing lists having
information on the gender of all genera. From the sounds of it, we are
potentially *decades* away from having such complete lists in most groups,
and thus also from a complete list for all animals. This means that the
action of finding the relevant genus and its gender is often not so simple,
and this will probably not change in the immediate future for many, if not
most, groups.
(4) Even if we had a database full of genera with all their genders,
figuring out the correct way to modify a given adjective or noun is not
necessarily straightforward. *Yes* there are tools out there to do this,
but it is still time-consuming, especially when you are doing large
taxonomic changes like transferring dozens of species from a genus of one
gender, to a genus of another gender.
(5) There are exceptions to some grammatical rules, making for strange
variants that have to be known to be used correctly. This takes some
specialist experience/knowledge.
(6) Many languages do not have a gendered noun concept at all, and the
concept can be challenging to learn for native speakers of those languages,
resulting in frequent errors. (Adam Cotton made this point much more
eloquently)
(7) With English as the lingua franca of taxonomy, most taxonomists are
already working in a language that is foreign to them; adding rules of
another language on top adds an unnecessary barrier to a field that is
already littered with barriers. Those barriers disproportionally affect
taxonomists in developing countries. Many might not have access to books of
Latin Grammar, and navigating the internet to find websites that will
decline their putative names for them is not so easy.

On the other hand, so far I have seen only two cogent arguments for
retaining gender agreement (i.e. not arguments along the lines of 'I find
it easy, so why don't you?'; these seem to be rather myopic views of the
issue that miss the points above):
(1) Names have changed until now, and if we were to force all back to their
original spellings, things could get messy for a time (although George
Beccaloni made a persuasive, if someone fanciful argument of how we could
do this and eventually stabilise the literature). David Campbell made a
good point here: 'Incorporating gender agreement into databases is
essential for compatibility with existing usage, whether or not it is
continued into the future.' Either way, the reality is that we need to
accommodate it in our databases. So the infrastructure to deal with it will
be there in any case.
(2) In principle, in some cases, you can logic out the correct ending of a
species name if you know the genus and the stem of the species name. (as
pointed out by Frank T. Krell).

Douglas Yenega asked 'If you never in your life had to personally research
the linguistic properties of names again, would you be willing to continue
using gender agreement?'
To that, my answer is increasingly 'no'. Even if it is zero effort for me
as a taxonomist to figure out what ending I should be using, the fact of
the matter is that it is confusing to everyone *else* in biology, and is
inconvenient for databasing and literature searches. I get frequent
complaints from colleagues about how taxonomists are changing names all the
time. We could make things a little easier on our friends by at least
abandoning changes to the spelling of the species name as it jumps from
genus to genus.

Personally, I quite liked the idea of recognising all gender variants as
the same name, but I fear this would ultimately lead to chaos in the
literature (especially the non-taxonomic literature). I think I prefer Adam
Cotton and George Beccaloni's suggestions; navigating our way towards
abandonment of gender agreement, through either adoption of original
spelling, or somehow taking the prevailing usage into account.

Jared said 'I think there are far more important matters to overhaul in the
field of taxonomy.' I don't disagree, but I have seldom seen a thread with
so much engagement from the taxonomic community on this listserv. That says
something about the importance and relevance of this issue.

Cheers,
Mark

*- - -Dr Mark D. Scherz, PhD (Dr rer. nat.)*
*Curator of Herpetology & **Assistant Professor of Vertebrate Zoology*
Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen
IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group
IUCN SSC Chameleon Specialist Group
<mark.scherz at gmail.com>
Skype: mark.scherz
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On Tue, 27 Jun 2023 at 16:38, Jared Bernard via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> I had no idea people had such intense objections to gender nomenclatural
> rules. Prior to a century ago, entire species descriptions had to be in
> Latin. It makes sense to switch descriptions to the language of the
> publications' readers, but does it not make sense to at least maintain
> nomenclatural rules to be consistent? I agree with Jan, Eckhard, and Lynn;
> gender agreement rules don't seem that difficult and I think there are far
> more important matters to overhaul in the field of taxonomy, such as that
> it's scarcely taught anymore (let alone practised) so that people studying
> biodiversity often have no grasp of the basic units of biodiversity.
> Jared
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> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for
> about 36 years, 1987-2023.
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