[Taxacom] FW: ICZN - gender of genus-group name ending in -ops

[bayshark at exemail.com.au]

BTW

I have a Chinese book by Li Jing Ke (The Coleoptera Fauna of Northeast
China. 1992) where just on one page is Alphitophagus spelled Alphiiophagus
and few lines down Alphiiopphagus.

Vratislav

 

-----Original Message-----

> 

> On Wed, May 18, 2016 5:28 pm, Frank Krell wrote:

>> For me, gender agreement saves a lot of time because I do not have

>> to look up the original spelling. Full stop.

> 

> Uh...what?  If there wasn't gender agreement, we wouldn't be having

> to deal with all of this nonsense because the original spelling

> would simply be THE SPELLING.  And we wouldn't be wasting time

> trying to determine if a word ending in -a is a feminine adjective

> or a noun in apposition, or is a non-Latinized word, etc. etc.

> 

> Unfortunately, now that it's been the practice for 200 years, we're

> stuck with this unholy mess and no easy way to fix it...

> 

> 

 

And the Chinese made a mess of a number of species in my group (and 

presumably in many other groups too) by changing the endings of nouns in 

apposition to 'agree' with the genus name, not realising that gender 

agreement does not apply in these cases. As a result several species are 

incorrectly spelt in Chinese literature, including one species which was the


subject of a paper published in PLoS ONE very recently. I was surprised that


none of the editors or peer reviewers noticed the -a had suddenly become -us


throughout this paper. This is because the (mostly Chinese) ecologists who 

wrote the paper used the Chinese book to identify the species without 

checking the correct spelling. Presumably the peer reviewers were not 

actually familiar with the species under consideration, otherwise they 

should have spotted the error immediately, as I did after downloading the 

paper.

 

Adam.