Language of Nomenclature

  Though not the first botanist to employ the concept of binomial names to plants, Linnaeus produced the first world flora wherein he gave generic and specific names to all the flowering plants of which he was aware. In the binomial, the generic name precedes the specific and is always written with an initial capital letter. The initial letter of the specific name is nowadays written with a lower case initial but in former times it was customary to capitalize the initial letter if the species was named after a proper noun such as a person or a genus.

  Binomials must be written using the letters of the Latin alphabet and are treated as a shorthand version of a sentence in that language. Accordingly, the grammatical rules of Latin are followed, treating the genus as a noun and the species as either an adjective or a noun. If the specific name is an adjective it will agree in gender with that of the genus. Because the Code was formalized relatively late in the history of taxonomic botany, strict application of its recommendations may result in minor changes to the spelling of older names. For example, prior to the acceptance of early versions of the Code it was not uncommon for botanists to emend spellings on quite arbitrary grounds, which usually reflected how the writer chose to transliterate the spelling, into the Latin alphabet, of words from other languages.

  For example, Jacquemont in 1809 coined the generic name Dinebra basing it on the Arabic vernacular name of the type species; a few years later in 1830 Presl emended the spelling to Dineba claiming his transliteration of the Arabic to be better than that of Jacquemont. Whether or not he was correct, the Rule of Priority established by the Code demands that the original spelling of the name must be accepted, unless a compelling case can be made to the contrary.

  With transliteration from Greek to Latin the problem is complicated by a lack of consistency amongst scholars from different countries. When Loureiro proposed the generic name Rhaphis (1790) he transliterated the Greek rho (ñ) as ‘rh’ whereas twentytwo years later Palisot de Beauvois (1802) transliterated the same letter as ‘r’ when he coined the name Rabdochloa.

  In Classical Greek times it was the custom when compounding two words to double rho when it was the initial letter of the second word. A common method of writing such compound words, in Botanical Latin, was to treat the first rho as the letter ‘r’ and the second as ‘rh’, a practice accepted in modern English for words such as diarrhoea (alternative spelling diarrhea) which derives from the Greek diarhrhoia through the Latin diarrhoea. Grass genera that follow this rule are Tetrarrhena, Triarrhena and Diarrhena. The eccentric biologist Rafinesque later spelt Diarrhena as Diarina – although the earlier name has priority under the Code, the alternate transliteration of the Greek would be acceptable under other circumstances.

  The convention adopted for the transliteration of rho has varied over time and the original spellings of names have sometimes been revised to suit the fashion of the day. Thus Haloragis, a dicotyledon, was spelled so by the authors of the genus in 1775 but during the 19th century the name was often changed to Halorrhagis, a practice now abandoned in favor of the original spelling.

  Although generic names always assume a Latin form, their spelling, especially if transliteration is involved, is not independent of the nationality of the describing au3 thor. For example, Moorochloa was described by a Dutch national who based the name upon the Greek word moros (µùñïó) transliterating the omega (ù) as ‘oo’ and the omicron (ï) as ‘o’. Such a practice would not be followed by an English author who would translate as ‘o’ both omicron and omega, as in the word ‘moron’, which is derived directly from the Greek.

  Because some phonemes of the Scandinavian languages are not represented by letters present in the Latin alphabet, their transliteration has sometimes led to variant spellings of the same name. Thus, the distinguished Swedish botanist Pehr Forsskål (1732–1763) has been honored by the following species epithets: Avena forskålei Vahl, Aristida forskohlei Tausch, Chaetaria forskholii Nees and Danthonia forskalii Trinius. In modern binomials, only the dieresis, denoting separate pronunciation of adjacent vowels (as seen on the ‘e’ in Chloë) is acceptable. All other diacritic marks and non- Roman letters are to be substituted by Roman letters; thus, the umlauts ä, ö and ü are represented by ‘ae’, ‘oe’ and ‘ue’ respectively, while the Scandinavian å becomes ‘ao’. With Russian and other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, problems of transliteration can become acute and even in Russian texts the same grass may be known under quite different spellings of the same name. Thus Agropyrum tschimganicum was described in 1923 by Drobow who two years later referred to it as A. czimganicum. When a language has no alphabet, as with Japanese, names prior to their latinization must be transliterated into one that does. Thus Tschonoskia is based on a German version of Chonosuke, the forename of a Japanese botanist.