Talk:Psittaci
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The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
The parrot tribe? In what classification? DTLHS (talk) 21:09, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
- Maybe erroneous for Psittacini, a tribe of birds in the Psittacinae subfamily of the Psittaculidae. --Lambiam 22:36, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
- During the Victorian era, writers were fond of overblown rhetorical flourishes such as calling fish "the finny tribe", but I don't think that's what we have here. I believe the current system of standard endings for ranks is only a century or two old, and the references that have this seem to predate it. You also see families referred to as "natural orders" at about the same time. I've tagged it as obsolete, since the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature now requires that all names at the rank of tribe must be formed by taking the genitive case of the name of the type genus, removing the genitive ending, and adding -ini. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:59, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
- Before I noticed the RfV, I edited the entry to make it an order, not a tribe.
- Century reports it as both an order and a tribe. But tribe seems to me to have been used rather loosely until relatively recently. Psittaci isn't really obsolete linguistically; it might be "archaic" because it is not much used in any recent works but is sufficiently similar to its modern replacement Psittaciformes to be recognized as referring to parrots. It would be reasonably clear that it refers to an order or to a taxon of some other rank (but certainly higher than a genus). DCDuring (talk) 03:26, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
- For people with a classical education the term is also recognizable as referring to parrots, since Latin psittaci is clearly the plural of psittacus (the Latinization of Ancient Greek ψιττακός (psittakós)), thus literally meaning “parrots“. --Lambiam 07:38, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
- During the Victorian era, writers were fond of overblown rhetorical flourishes such as calling fish "the finny tribe", but I don't think that's what we have here. I believe the current system of standard endings for ranks is only a century or two old, and the references that have this seem to predate it. You also see families referred to as "natural orders" at about the same time. I've tagged it as obsolete, since the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature now requires that all names at the rank of tribe must be formed by taking the genitive case of the name of the type genus, removing the genitive ending, and adding -ini. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:59, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
- RFV resolved. Easily attested, and the RFV seems to have been more a search for clarification than for cites. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:21, 4 November 2018 (UTC)