[Taxacom] ICZN - gender of genus-group name ending in -oops

[Adam Cotton]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Schueler" <bckcdb at istar.ca>
To: <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 20, 2016 11:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] ICZN - gender of genus-group name ending in -oops


> On 5/20/2016 11:47 AM, Francisco Welter-Schultes wrote:
>
>>  The real life experience is that most have not
>> been made up in a way that they actually do partical recognition.
>>
>> If you look for alba in an important resource like
>> http://www.faunaeur.org you only get alba and not albus and not album.
>>
>> Even if you look on the electronic file of Sherborn's Index Animalium,
>> which in its printed version 100 years ago ignored the ending and listed
>> alba and albus as if they did not differ in spelling, you will not find
>> albus if you request alba.
>
> * didn't Pat LaFollette's CURATOR data system of 1979 handle gender 
> agreement of genus and epithet? Certainly this isn't very expensive: it 
> would just require an hour and a half of coding, inserting the binary 
> variable NOUN-IN-APP for the epithet, and then finding tables of the 
> gender forms of latin & greek adjectives.
>
> fred.
>

Original descriptions, at least for relatively new names, would still have 
to be checked to make sure there isn't a disclaimer stating that the epithet 
is not to be treated as an adjective. Even for obvious seeming adjectives, 
if it is stated in the original description that it is a noun in apposition 
etc then gender agreement does not apply to that name.

More time wasted by humans.

Adam.