[CPN] Revision of proposed changes in Art. 21

    Cantino, Philip cantino at ohio.edu
    Wed Mar 27 16:04:23 EDT 2013 
    Please see my comments inserted below in Jim's message.
Phil


On Mar 27, 2013, at 3:07 PM, James Doyle wrote:

> 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. 
>  
I have no objection to adding the sentence that Jim is suggesting if it will help avoid confusion.


>> 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. 
>  
I don't think it matters when or by whom a taxon was ranked as a species.  The last part of that sentence is simply referring to the situation where someone phylogenetically defines the name of a clade that has the same content as a taxon that someone has named as a species, or a clade nested within a taxon that someone has named as a species.  


> - In Recommendation 21.3B, Example 3, should "epithet" in the first 
> line be "specific name or epithet" for consistency with usage 
> elsewhere? 
>  
I agree.  Thanks for catching this.


> - 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. 
>  
Rec. 21A says that "hierarchical relationships among the taxa ...can be indicated in a variety of ways...   The examples we give are not intended to be exhaustive or prescriptive.  Some of the examples use slashes or colons and some use spaces, so I don't think we are promoting any particular convention.  





> 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 
> 
     
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