[WikiEN-l] A short comment on Birds... er, birds, uh... Birds

[Ray Saintonge]

Stan Shebs wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> It is certainly true that we have had virtually no disputes about
>> American/British spelling.  I'm not sure that this precedent is
>> assurance of the same thing happening with the Bird/bird issue,
>> though. 
>
> I suspect that everybody who's thought it through for a couple
> minutes realizes that that there's no possible authority to
> which one can appeal on the issue of American/British spelling.
> Envy the French! :-) 

Thus we accomodate both.

> For biology the naming situation seems to be in ferment, and in
> some cases there are now authorities who've stepped forward and
> staked a position.  (Sort of like the British Museum issuing
> new guidelines directing the use of American English in all of
> its work - there would be rioting in London I'm sure. :-) ) 

Imposing English official names for species, would lead to riots in 
other capitals.  These other languages have their own common names, and 
their own capitalization rules.  Imposing American English on the 
British Museum sounds easier.

> I think there are several changes converging to make this into
> an issue:
> 1. Latin is really becoming a dead language - the Linnaean names
> mean something if you learned Latin in school, but are just noises
> if you didn't.  Studies have shown that nonsense words are extremely
> difficult to memorize, and scientists don't care for the extra work
> any more than anybody else does. 

The Linnaean names are not nonsense words.  Even if the principle of 
English official names could be accepted it would give rise to an 
enormous number of bureaucratic committees to study and establish the 
"correct" names for every imaginable life form.  That's not exactly a 
situation to please those who don't care for extra work.

> 2. English dominates scientific discourse more and more every year. 

This sounds like an argument in favour of the Tyranny of the Majority. 
 (See de Tocqueville)

> 3. Taxonomic churning, as Tannin alluded to, means that the primary
> purposes of Linnaean names - clarity and unambiguity - have been
> trashed. Taxonomists are doing this all very earnestly, I wonder
> if they're aware of the distrust they're generating.  I can see a
> future, for instance, where for animals Linnaean names have fallen
> out of use entirely, in favor of English common names. 

I have not reviewed the facts about ''Cynocephalus'' but I have no 
reason to doubt them.  I suspect that this sort of thing will continue 
to happen  in whatever language may be chosen.  Using English names as 
an official standard is not likely to save us.  I tend to lay the modern 
blame on the cladists who have revised taxonomy into a series of 
counter-intuitive groupings based on DNA evolutionary research.  The 
average birder does not have the means at his disposal to sort them out 
that way..  As an example of equal confusion in English names take the 
genus ''Anas''; it includes ducks, teals, the gadwall, widigeons, the 
mallard, pintails, the garganey, and shovellers.  On top of that there 
are 17 other genera in the Anseriformes that include ducks.  Are we any 
better off with the English?

> Linnaean names have long-accepted typographic conventions
> (capitalize genera, use italics, etc), but the formalized use of
> common names is pretty new, and so far the only proposed convention
> seems to be to capitalize.  It's not yet authoritative enough for
> Wikipedia to set in stone (except for birds), but if the trends
> continue, capitalization of common names may come to be an
> accepted standard that we enforce as strongly as we do now for
> formatting of Linnaean names. 

We also need to take into account the contrary trend among grammar 
stylists to downstyle capitalization.  In the course of developing my 
position in the present debate I encountered at least one book that 
considers completely downstyled titles as perfectly correct with only 
the first letter in the title being capitalized; another recognizes it 
as perfectly correct to use lower case for pronouns that refer to the 
deity.  A new edition of the ''Chicago manual of style" is due to come 
out in August; I'm anxious to see what it has to say about its own name.

Eclecticology

>