[CPN] Revision of proposed changes in Art. 21

[James Doyle]

Hello Phil and other CPN members,

>Discussion of the proposed changes in Art. 21 seems to have ended.

Sorry to have been so slow...

>In a March 16 email message, David M. raised several issues. 
>Several of us voiced objections to David's proposed recommendation 
>about stating one's species concept when describing a new species 
>under a rank-based code,

Just for the record, I agree with the idea of keeping reference to 
different species concepts out of the code (i.e., deleting the old 
Recommendation 21.4C), on the grounds that this is a matter of 
taxonomic concepts rather than nomenclature, and this code should 
deal strictly with the latter.

>but he raised several other issues in that message, which I think are valid.
>
>In the attached revision of the proposed changes, Kevin and I have 
>addressed the issues David raised.  In some cases we adopted his 
>proposed wording, and in some we did not.  All changes from the 
>document I sent you on March 15 are highlighted in yellow.  So if 
>you already decided you approve the wording of that earlier set of 
>proposals, you only need to read the yellow-highlighted sections of 
>this set.

It's funny, when I first read the section in Note 21A.1 on gender and 
number agreement of species and clade names (specifically the note's 
prohibition of changes to accomplish this), I misread it just the way 
David did, missing "that is not a genus."  I was of the last 
generation in my town that had Latin in high school, and I've always 
been a fanatical amateur linguist, so names like "Passer domestica" 
or "Rosa californicus" would give me the reaction some people have to 
chalk being scraped on a blackboard.  Rather like "this algae is," 
which seems to come from a growing lack of awareness among 
anglophones that words borrowed from some languages have plurals that 
end in something other than -s, which I attribute to the fact that 
the only foreign languages familiar to any students in the US these 
days are Spanish (where all plurals end in -s) or Chinese (where 
there is no marked distinction between singular and plural).  I 
wonder if a sentence like "When a species uninomen is combined with a 
genus name, its gender may be changed to agree with that of the genus 
name" could be added.  Actually I'd prefer "should be changed," but 
if even David thinks we should let chaos reign, I wouldn't insist on 
this.  I hate to see a total loss of the tradition that scientific 
names of taxa should be Latin or latinized.  Notice also that this 
problem applies only to adjectival species names, not possessives, 
which don't change with the gender or number of the thing possessed.

>Let's give ourselves a couple of days to comment on the new parts. 
>If no additional issues arise, I'll call for a vote on Wednesday.

Other points:

- At the end of Note 21.1.1, what exactly is meant by "taxa that are 
ranked as species"?  Ranked as species by whom, the original author? 
If so, "that have been ranked as species" or "that were originally 
ranked as species" would be clearer.  If not, some less condensed 
wording may be needed to avoid confusion like mine.

- In Recommendation 21.3B, Example 3, should "epithet" in the first 
line be "specific name or epithet" for consistency with usage 
elsewhere?

- In Example 1 under Note 21.4B.1 and Example 1 under Recommendation 
21A, do we want to encourage the use of slashes and colons rather 
than spaces between taxon names?  To me it looks ugly.  Or is this a 
convention that some people are already using?  If the latter, I 
won't fight it.  Actually, I guess I won't fight it in any case.

Jim
-- 
James A. Doyle
Department of Evolution and Ecology
University of California
Davis, CA 95616, USA
Telephone:  1-530-752-7591; fax:  1-530-752-1449