[CPN] Revision of proposed changes in Art. 21

[Cantino, Philip]

David,

I think you are misinterpreting Note 21A.1.  The note begins "When a species uninomen is combined with a clade name that is not also a genus..."  This is the only situation the Note refers to in saying that the ending of the uninomen should not be changed to agree in gender or number.  If a uninomen is combined with the name of a clade that is also a genus, the last sentence in the Note doesn't apply.  Perhaps we need to make this clearer by adding "unless that name is a genus name with which the uninomial is combined in a rank-based classification" at the end of that sentence.  One of our earlier drafts of this Note did include this, but we decided it was redundant with the first sentence.  Would adding that qualification resolve the problem you are seeing in the current wording?  

Phil




On Mar 25, 2013, at 1:39 PM, David Marjanovic wrote:

> 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.
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