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muddying the waters??


Nick,
I'm muddying the waters?? If I say Class Mammalea, everyone knows what I am talking about. Not like Maniraptora where you have to ask if that is according to Sereno's definition or Gauthier's definition. Or Pseudosuchia (is that sensu Gauthier or sensu Benton??). And Ornithosuchia that doesn't include Ornithosuchidae. By comparison, Mammalea vs. Mammalia is crystal-clear.
And I would recommend that you look at any volume of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology sometime. It is my understanding that they do NOT consider emended names to be "new" names, and the emended names are still followed by the original author and date.
The days of perfectly formed Latin names are probably going to soon be history. For instance that recently named family by some Chinese paleontologists---the genus ended in -pteryx, and they ended the family name in -pteridae instead of -pterygidae.
Starobogatov's perfectly formed Latin names with unfamiliar roots and weird new endings have been almost totally ignored thus far. If I have to offend a few Latin scholars, I would rather do that than have names that not only muddy the water, but which people will neither recognize or use. My goal is longterm stability through non-radical standardized emendation. Totally new names are what I am trying to avoid.
Many ornithologists decades ago probably loudly protested that all those new -iformes names were "muddying the waters", but everybody uses them today. However, a lot of confusion and bad feelings could have been avoided by simply not mandating typification. Starobogatov's proposals would create taxonomic confusion the likes of which biology has never seen, but if someone doesn't nip it in the bud, that is probably what we will get somewhere down the road.
-----Ken Kinman
P.S. By the way, are there any rules in any of the new International Codes which I have broken in emending Class names to -ea. In the past, the codes may have made "Recommendations" on the formation of higher taxon names such as Classes), but few, if any, "Rules".
******************************************************* 
From: NJPharris@aol.com
To: qilongia@yahoo.com, dinosaur@usc.edu
CC: kinman@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: non-avian "reptiles"
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 02:40:27 EDT

In a message dated 8/2/00 9:22:34 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
qilongia@yahoo.com writes:

>    Ending -ea is identical to -ia, one is Greek, the
>  other a Latinization of the Greek (Latin is -es). I
>  believe the ICZN forbids the coinage in any sense
>  ("into Latin" and all that).

Well, not exactly. -ia is both good Greek and good Latin (the two are
reasonably closely related, and many of their endings are similar). In both
languages, the ending consists of the adjective formant -i- plus the neuter
plural ending -a. Thus, "X-ia" means "things that have to do with X" or
"things related to X".

-es is also found in both Greek and Latin (though the e is short in Greek and
long in Latin). Ciconiiformes is a Latin example (the plural of
"ciconiiformis"), Ornithothoraces a Greek one (the plural of "ornithothorax").

-ea shows up occasionally as the result of adding the neuter plural -a to a
Greek stem ending in -e-.  The suffix "oidea", for instance, is actually
composed of a connecting vowel -o- plus the stem eide- "looking like" plus
the neuter plural -a; therefore tyrannosauroeidea (contracted, as usual, to
tyrannosauroidea) are, literally, "tyrant lizard-like looking" things.

Anyway, -ea has no place in a word like "Mammalea".  "mammal-" is a Latin
third declension adjective stem, which requires first an -i- and then a
gender/number ending, in this instance, -a.

>    The root of "Aves" is "avis", bird, and the
>  pluralized taxon means "all the birds;" "Avea" is not
>  just redundant, it would corrupt the root: a proper
>  coinage would, I believe, be "Avesea" or "Avisea".

Oh my, no. "Avesea" or "Avisea" would be adding endings to endings, which is
a cardinal sin :-). I'm afraid there is no good way to get an -ea ending
onto the "avi-" stem, since the stem a) is Latin and b) does not end in -e-.

Different names have different endings because they are formed in different
ways, from different parts.

Once again, I must implore Honorable Person Kinman to do one of two things:
either create entirely new names which are proper analogues of the names he
wishes to emulate (if standardization is truly what he desires), or stop
muddying the waters with all these mal-formed (and expressly synonymous) new
designations!

Thank you for your patience.

Nick P. 
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