[Taxacom] validation of taxon names

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

From: "Wolfgang Lorenz" <faunaplan at googlemail.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 7:50 PM

The Zoological Code is mainly ruling on 3 categories of names:
1) "Family-group nominal taxa and their names" Chapter 8
2) "Genus-group nominal taxa and their names" Chapter 9
3) "Species-group nominal taxa and their names" Chapter 10

The name of a species-group nominal taxon is a bi- or trinomen.
But the Glossary says a species-group name is the epithet alone...
Logic???

***
Yes, in the zoological Code not only is a species name something
entirely different from a specific name, and a subspecies name
something entirely different from a subspecific name, but a 
species-group name is also very confusing.

In a Code where a family-group name is the scientific name of a
family-group taxon and a genus-group name is the scientific name 
of a genus-group taxon one would expect a species-group name
to be the scientific name of a species-group taxon. Not so. If I 
have it right then
* scientific names of species-group taxa
* names of species-group taxa
* species-group names
are three different things.

I call this bad design. It is no wonder that, even on this list,
there are those who use species names where they mean to 
refer to specific names (and misspell "binominal name").

If one goes back far enough one find a time when, officially,
a specific name was the name of a species; it consisted of a
combination of a generic name and a trivial name. Perhaps 
not so pretty, but fairly unambiguous.

It won't be easy, but it should be possible to regain an equal
level of unambiguity.

Paul