{"id":378,"date":"2020-10-25T16:11:59","date_gmt":"2020-10-25T16:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/?p=378"},"modified":"2022-10-25T17:55:21","modified_gmt":"2022-10-25T17:55:21","slug":"whats-in-a-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/2020\/10\/25\/whats-in-a-name\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in a name?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in June of this year, I wrote about the human propensity for categorizing and naming things: All things–people, animals, tools, geographic entities, diseases, cars–you (*ahem<\/em>*) name it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a biologist, though, my concern here is the naming of organisms, and owing to my own leanings, I shall generally focus on animal names in what is intended to be a series of posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost 300 years ago the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus proposed a binomial (“two-name”) system for naming organisms (initially plants), which system has been globally accepted and adopted. Simply put, the name given to each species of living or extinct organism comprises two parts: a genus and a specific epithet<\/strong>. The former is always capitalized; the latter, never, even when it’s a proper noun, as we shall see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, any organism reading this is a member of–in all likelihood–the genus Homo<\/em>…and in particular is a member of the species Homo sapiens<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, people being people, we made rules about such names–first and foremost being that all such names shall be either of Latin or Greek origin…or at the very least “Greek- or Latinized,” i.e. having Latin or Greek endings. By international agreement only the Roman alphabet is used. Furthermore, everything being appropriately “-ized,” the names of all species are therefore treated as foreign terms and set in italics accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the name of our own species comes from directly from the Latin words “Homo<\/em>” for “man,” and “sapiens<\/em>” (its being the present participle of the Latin verb sapere<\/em>, translated as “to be wise”), and neither term required any Latinization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>

Naturally, though, many things have been named in a manner that takes liberties with the “-ized” rule, so e.g. we have the dung beetle genus “Cartwrightia<\/em>” erected by Federico Islas Salas*👇<\/a> to honor one Oscar Cartwright (note the “-ia” Latinizing his surname); Old Oscar himself later named a new species of Cartwrightia<\/em> for his brother, Raymond, so we have the species Cartwrightia cartwrighti<\/em> (the “-i” simultaneously Latinizing the name and indicating that it’s named in honor of someone, in this case that someone having the same surname, of course).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cartwightia
The dung beetle, Cartwightia cartwrighti<\/em> Cartwright, 1967.
Photo by Showtaro Kakizoe: https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/155674919@N03\/49788757946\/in\/pool-lamellicornia\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Making this name more fun (Ha! As if that were even possible!) is that for scientific publication the name of the original author<\/em> of a species and the year of its description are listed after the binomial, so I should have written “Homo sapien<\/em>s Linnaeus, 1758,” and, for our dung beetle we get (you ready?):

Cartwrightia cartwrighti<\/em> Cartwright, 1967<\/strong><\/font>.<\/center><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, there’s the basic structure of scientific names. Next time, we’ll discuss a few other organisms that have been given um… “unusual” names!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n<\/a>

<\/a>*👆<\/a> Islas erected the genus Cartwrightia<\/em> in 1958, and he named its first–and therefore defining–species “Cartwrightia intertribalis<\/em> Islas, 1958).”
<\/p><\/font>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in June of this year, I wrote about the human propensity for categorizing and naming things: All things–people, animals, tools, geographic entities, diseases, cars–you (*ahem*) name it! As a biologist, though, my concern here is the naming of organisms, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zeppmusic.com\/Arthroblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}