[CPN] Revision of proposed changes in Art. 21

[David Marjanovic]

I'm fine with everything except the new Note 21A.1 (with its example). 
It says "the ending of the uninomen should not be changed" -- changed 
from where? It's not an uncommon situation, in vertebrate zoology at 
least, that a species is commonly referred to at least two different 
genera in the current literature and therefore shows different gender 
agreement simultaneously for years or decades.

It looks like an obvious solution to go back to the publication that 
established the name -- but in many cases the original is long forgotten 
and very hard to guess. For instance, *Passer domesticus*, the house 
sparrow, has been used as a specifier in plenty of phylogenetic 
definitions, and that has been its name since 1760. But Linnaeus, two 
years earlier, called it *Fringilla domestica* (lumping all finches into 
a single genus, I suppose). Despite having leafed through facsimile 
editions of Systema Naturae (10th ed.) a few times, I only know this 
because Jacques Gauthier and various coauthors made the effort of 
digging up the original forms of the names of all species they were 
using as specifiers in a few papers in 2001 -- and at least some of 
those are hidden in an edited book that not many systematists in the 
world have ever read. (It's an expensive symposium volume, printed on 
very heavy paper despite the paperback, about the origin of birds and 
the then recent discoveries of feathered and otherwise interesting 
nonavian theropods.) So, telling people to go back to the original would 
mean a lot of work for very little return.

I suggest to leave all agreement optional. Don't regard the ending as 
part of the name -- the rank-based codes don't either. Let chaos reign, 
or leave it to the journals, but don't forbid agreement.

Personally, I'm in an unusual situation: not only do I natively speak a 
language where adjectives agree in gender/number/case with the nouns 
they refer to, but I can read scientific papers in at least 4 more such 
languages, and I had 6 years of Latin in school. In short, it comes 
naturally to me. I don't fall on my sword when other people get the 
gender agreement of binominals wrong, but I really don't want to have to 
get such agreement wrong myself.