Taxacom: Latin

Thu Jun 29 07:39:36 CDT 2023

> Zoo-taxonomist have lots of time on their hands to engage in gender
agreement discussions. This has been proven again and again.
The time waste argument seems to be a red herring 😊.

Thank you, Frank! In almost 20 years on Taxacom I heard it all already;
these discussions break out every couple of years. Come on, people, get a
life! Go to the field, sort a Malaise trap sample, re-curate a genus,
describe a new species - would be much more useful :)

Cheers,

Vlad

--
Dr Vladimir Blagoderov, FLS, FRMS
Principal curator – Invertebrates

National Museums Scotland

Chambers Street

Edinburgh

EH1 1JF

National Museums Collection Centre

242 West Granton Road

Edinburgh

EH5 1JA

tel. +44(0)131 247 4261

e-mail:

*v.blagoderov at nms.ac.uk <vblagoderov at nms.ac.uk>*
vblago at gmail.com

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On Wed, 28 Jun 2023 at 00:35, Frank T. Krell via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> "(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)."
> - paraphrased almost correctly. It should read: "In principle, in most
> cases..."
>
> Zoo-taxonomist have lots of time on their hands to engage in gender
> agreement discussions. This has been proven again and again.
> The time waste argument seems to be a red herring 😊.
>
> Frank
>
>
> Dr. Frank-Thorsten Krell
>
> Senior Curator of Entomology, Editor-in-Chief
> Commissioner and Councillor, International Commission on Zoological
> Nomenclature
> Department of Zoology
> Denver Museum of Nature & Science
> 2001 Colorado Blvd
> Denver, Colorado 80205-5798, U.S.A.
> Frank.krell at dmns.org
> Phone 303.370.8244
> Fax 303.331.6492
> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dmns.org%2Fscience%2Fzoology%2Fstaff%2Ffrank-krell%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C65a9693883054323193108db789ded42%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638236391923584166%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=n%2BzYV1Elw%2F%2B1VGoFiHdUPqx0IdWH3Evymc4mhqNsXjk%3D&reserved=0
>
> Bugs: They’re bigger, they’re better, they’re buggier than ever! It’s all
> about precision flight, swarm intelligence and mind control in the world of
> “Bugs," the exhibition. Marvel at their adaptive genius and see if you can
> match their brilliance.
>
>
> Bugs: Son más grandes, mejores y más increíbles que nunca. En la
> exhibición "Bugs" todo gira en torno al vuelo de precisión, la inteligencia
> en grupo y el control mental. ¡Descubre lo genios que son!
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Mark D. Scherz
> via Taxacom
> Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2023 4:59 PM
> To: Jared Bernard <bernardj at hawaii.edu>
> Cc: Taxacom Mailinglist <taxacom at lists.ku.edu>
> Subject: Re: Taxacom: Latin
>
> 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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>
> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for
> about 36 years, 1987-2023.
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>
> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for
> about 36 years, 1987-2023.
>