Paul Callomon
Collections Manager
Malacology, Invertebrate Paleontology and General Invertebrates
Department of Malacology
Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Parkway, Philadelphia PA 19103-1195, USA
Tel 215-405-5096
Fax 215-299-1170
Secretary, American Malacological Society
On the web at www.malacological.org
>>> Paul Callomon 4/30/2007 9:19 am >>>
Hi Harry,
Good to hear you are doing well, and that we will be seeing you in
October. We hope to have a big show this year. I am copying this reply
to the Conch-L list, as there may be others who wonder about this.
Now then. Scientific names are written, as you know, in Latin. This
language has a number of features that seem to have been deliberately
designed to make everyone's life difficult without helping us do much,
and chief among these is gender. In Latin (and French, and German, and
Spanish, and Russian, but not - thank goodness - in English) all nouns
belong to one of two or three genders: masculine, feminine and (in some
languages) neuter. Sometimes these genders are what you'd expect: 'Der
Mann' (the man, German) is masculine, and 'Die Frau' (the woman, German)
is feminine. In some cases, however, the gender assignment makes no
sense at all. 'Das Maedchen' (the girl, German) is neuter, not
feminine!
Once you get away from words denoting things that actually have gender
in real life - animals, basically - it clearly makes no sense at all to
assign gender to nouns and decide that, for example, 'a bridge' is
masculine but 'liberty' is feminine. Assigning gender to nouns was one
of the stupidest developments in the evolution of languages, and one of
the reasons English has succeeded so well in the world is that it never
had such a system.
Because...with gender comes the concept of 'agreement'. If your noun is
feminine, says the agreement rule, then any adjective you attach to it
must also be in a feminine form. 'Strombus' is a noun, and it's
masculine. 'latissumus' is an adjective, and when you use it with
'Strombus' it takes the '-us' ending to match that of 'Strombus'. On the
other hand, 'Carinaria' is feminine, so when you use the same adjective
it becomes 'latissima', with a feminine '-a' ending to match the
feminine noun.
So you can see that before you decide what the ending on the adjective
should be (-us, -um, -e or -a), you need to know what the gender of the
noun is.
Happily for us in molluscland, Gary has compiled a little guide to the
genders of molluscan genus names. It's online at
http://www.malacolog.org/search.php?mode=trivialgender
Using this, you can figure out what your adjective ending should be.
Still, it's a real pain to those of us who did not have a Classical
Education to have to consider gender at all.
Unfortunately, many species names have other endings than the simple
gender-indicating ones. A couple are:
- ensis: 'comes from', e. g. 'fijiensis', comes from Fiji
- cola: 'lives among', e. g. 'arenicola', lives in sand
- phila, philum: 'likes', e. g. 'coralliophila', likes coral
- i, the masculine possessive: 'vokesi', Vokes's (meaning Harold, a
man)
- ae, the feminine possessive: 'vokesae', Vokes's (meaning Emily, a
woman)
- orum, the plural possessive: 'vokesorum', Vokes's (meaning both of
them)
Nowadays, too, the rules have been relaxed so that you don't have to
use strict Latin construction any more. Gary and I named Thaluta
takenoko a few years back; 'Thaluta' is a made-up word, a combination of
'Thala' and 'Voluta' that I guess should be feminine, but 'takenoko' is
a Japanese word so it doesn't matter.
I hope all this helps, and commiserate with anyone trying to tackle
this without the benefit of a Classical Education (like me, ahem. They
didn't teach Latin at the schools I attended in the 1970s). The
principal reason we use Latin in nomenclature is that it is a dead
language, and as you can see there are good reasons for that.
Cheers,
PC.
Paul Callomon
Collections Manager
Malacology, Invertebrate Paleontology and General Invertebrates
Department of Malacology
Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Parkway, Philadelphia PA 19103-1195, USA
Tel 215-405-5096
Fax 215-299-1170
Secretary, American Malacological Society
On the web at www.malacological.org
>>> "Harry" <[log in to unmask]> 4/28/2007 12:10 pm >>>
Hi Paul,
Hope things are going well. Yes I plan to come up to the show this
year.
Harry Lee tried to explain to me when to use ata and when to use atum
with
the species endings, but I had trouble understanding him because it was
not
down to my level. Can you help. Working on miters and he pointed out
this
one should be ata and this one should be atum. Very confusing.
Harry B.
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