User:DCDuring/TaxonGenderProblems

One taxonomists thoughts on gender in taxonomic names

[Taxacom] Goddess Changes Sex, or the Gender Game

John Grehan via mailman.nhm.ku.edu 11:23 AM (8 hours ago)

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In reference to some brief discussion of gender rules in taxonomy I have appended below the text from an article on the subject that may be of passing interest. First published just over 50 years ago and seems to be still relevant today. Any mistyping my responsibility.

John Grehan

Goddess Changes Sex, or the Gender Game

John R. G. Turner

Systematic Zoology, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Dec., 1967), pp. 349-350

In his recent criticism of the gender rule in zoological nomenclature, Moore (1966) discusses the difficulty of deciding on the gender of a genus: he does not mention a problem that I have found most teasing – discovering whether a specific name is substantive, and therefore invariant, or adjectival, and therefore with a variable ending. It may be reasonable to expect zoologists to manage -*us, -a, -um* endings and the more awake ones to manage *-is, -is, -e,* but they can hardly be expected to have an extensive knowledge of Latin and Greek adjectives, much less of classical mythology. The sneaking pleasure that I, and perhaps others, derive from exercising scholastic pedantry, thereby feeling in touch with the great stream of Western Culture, hardly compensates for the time spent hunting through Latin and Greek dictionaries.

In working on the evolution of the South American butterfly genus

• Heliconius* (e.g. Turner, 1965) I have had to sort out some of its very

tangled systematics and nomenclature. The trouble is that there is a tradition going right back to Linnaeus of giving the species the names of nymphs and muses (*Heliconius* = dweller on Mount Helicon), so that one has a masculine genus with a feminine species; moreover, there was at one time a feminine genus *Heliconia*, now in synonymy, with which some of the adjectival names agreed. As classical names ran out, systematists named the butterflies after their wives, rivers with classical-sounding names, saints and opera-heroines; one needs to know not only mythology, but biogeography, geography, hagiography, and musicology.

Understandably, systematists have changed endings that should have remained, and unable to master the many names of Venus and all the other ladies, have come up with *cytherus, veustus *(“Scandal in temple. Vestal Virgins say *We are just good friends*”), *eulalius, egerius, antigonus, lucius* and so on. Now these are deliberate emendations, and under the *Code

• are strictly junior synonyms, to be taken into account in future

revisions. In addition to these very clear cases, there are some that are almost impossible to decide, at least without consulting a classicist. Did Linnaeus intend *charitonia*, frequently rendered *charitonius* (from

• Charites*, the Graces), to be an artificial noun or an adjective, and if

the latter, why did he not make it agree with its genus (*Papilio* at that time)? Did Cramer intend *numata* to be some obscure nymph (an appellation of Egeria perhaps, who taught the mythical Numa), or did he just mis-spell

• nummata* (=wealthy); and again, why did it not agree? (See also Turner,

1967.)

The gender rule not only promotes instability of names which are adjectival, it wastes much time in deciding difficult cases, and when a hard-worked zoologist does not notice that the name is substantive, results in an unnecessary synonym. Surely, the only sensible thing to do is retain the original spelling of all names (Barring misprints), even as far as the termination.

John R.G. Turner Department of Biology University of York, York, England _______________________________________________ Taxacom Mailing List Send Taxacom mailing list submissions to: Taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu