Taxacom: A compromise solution (was Re: Single official lists of taxa (sensu Doug Yanega many proposals to this list))

[kotatsu at fripost.org]

This also seems to miss the point.

The point, as I understand it, is that instead of having A-us b-us (for 
instance) as a universal pattern within a genus, you would have to 
remember (or look up) whether it is A-us b-us, A-us b-um, A-us b-e, A-us 
b-a, etc., individually for each species. There would be no way to ever 
predict what the name ends in for anyone, regardless of whether you had 
a classical education, speak a Romance language, or just like Latin. It 
would all be based on whatever someone thought was the prevailing usage 
within the group at an arbitrarily chosen point in time.

I don't care much either way when it comes to gender agreement but this 
seems to be unnecessarily complicated for no clear reason. It reminds me 
of nothing so much as when some phylocoders got the great idea to freeze 
genus+species for each taxon so that the genus name was preserved even 
if the species changed clades, and there would be no predictability of 
relationship based on the name that is used.

Cheers,
Daniel

> 
> You seem to have missed the whole point, you would no longer need to
> worry whether a genus and a species name is masculine, feminine or
> neuter EVER again, they would become names that never change.
> 
> Adam.

>> No, sorry, I absolutely do not like Adam's suggestion. Then genera 
>> will
>> contain some names with masculine, some with feminine, and some with 
>> neuter
>> ending, and sorry, I do not want to remember that "OK, Bombus 
>> lapidarius,
>> Bombus ruderatus, Bombus alpinus, Bombus confusus, Bombus auricomus 
>> and
>> Bombus balteatus are all masculine, but Bombus germanica and Bombus 
>> pulchra
>> are feminine and Bombus nigrum is neuter, because they were recently
>> transferred from other genera and they kept their former ending. 
>> (Imaginary
>> names.) Throwing away rules and making people remember each and every 
>> name
>> one by one is considerably more difficult than following rules. People 
>> can
>> cite examples of problematic adjectives, but the fact is that the
>> overwhelming majority of the adjectives are easy to handle.

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> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration
> for about 36 years, 1987-2023.

-- 
Dr. Daniel R. Gustafsson, Research Assistant Professor
Institute of Zoology Guangdong Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China.

Ask me about chewing lice!