Genus names in German and other languages

General
1

Hi everyone,

I have a question about best practices for consistent curation of common names. I will explain the issue in the context of German common names, which are the ones I deal with most frequently, but the same issue presumably arises in many other languages.

In German there are many genera with common names equal to the (pluralised) common name of a particular species. In cases where the plural is unmarked, the genus common name and species common name appear identical. In some cases, these are monotypic genera, for example:

Genus Erithacus: Rotkehlchen ( https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/13093-Erithacus )

Species Erithacus rubecula: Rotkehlchen ( https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/13094-Erithacus-rubecula )

In other cases, they are polytypic genera with only a single species in Europe, for example:

Genus Perisoreus: Unglßckshäher ( https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/8333-Perisoreus )

Species Perisoreus infaustus: Unglßckshäher ( https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/8333-Perisoreus )

In many but certainly not all such cases, the German common name of the genus is qualified by adding “Gattung” (meaning “genus”) in parentheses. You can see many examples here:

https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=gattung

This practice prevents the common names for the genus and species from being identical and presumably reduces the number of unintentional IDs to genus level. Anecdotally, such IDs are common. However, it seems to be also explicitly against iNaturalist policy, which says ( https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide ):

Just the Name, Please

Don’t add information to a name in addition to the name itself, e.g. “grumblefoots (this genus is monotypic, just ID to species!).” We use names in a lot of places for a lot of different reasons and adding extraneous information just makes them more confusing to users and more cumbersome to incorporate into designs (e.g. they might make it impossible to show a common name and a scientific name at the same time). If there is a real problem with misuse of a name, we would prefer to handle it in code and not in the name itself.

A similar issue occurs with many higher taxa. See e.g. the genus Heterodontus ( https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/57819-Heterodontus ). In English, the order, family and genus all carry the common name “Bullhead sharks”. In Germany, we see “Stierkopfhaie (Familie)” and “Stierkopfhaie (Gattung)”.

What do you think is the best way to deal with this situation? I can see two main solutions:

  1. Apply current iNat policy strictly. This means that all current additions of “Gattung” or other taxonomic ranks to common names should be removed.
  2. Allow the addition of the taxonomic rank in brackets only when the common names of nested taxa are identical. This would allow “Rotkehlchen (Gattung)” and “Unglückshäher (Gattung)” for the genera. It would also allow “Stierkopfhaie (Familie)” and “Stierkopfhaie (Gattung)” to distinguish the genus from the family and presumably also the English equivalents “Bullhead sharks (genus)” and “Bullhead sharks (family)”.

Personally I could see either 1 or 2 working, with a slight preference for 2. What we currently have is an inconsistent mixture of the two.

I’d be interested in examples from other languages and in your views on the best way to proceed.

Edit: Removed a mention of “Bartmeisen”, as I realised that both the genus and the family carry this name, so it is analogous to “Stierkopfhaie”.

3 Likes
2

Do not forget to select German as a lexicon (which causes that also your app changes to German without reason). I do agree that the same name for genus and species causes selection the wrong taxon, so I stopped with adding names to the genus if it is the same as a species name. In Observation this is solved by the option of

  1. adding the scientific name in the apps, so the genus name contains the rank genus/species.
2 Likes
3

Would it be smart to remove common names from higher ranks that contain subordinate taxa with the exact same common name? This might affect a lot of species but could improve the specificity of identifications.

4

In Spanish, nouns that end in ‘s’ add “-es” if the stress is on the last syllable or there’s only one syllable, but if the stress is before the last syllable, the “-s” plural suffix is folded into the “-s” of the word, resulting in no change. The Venus flytrap is “Venus atrapamoscas” (I’d say “atrapamoscas Venus” because modifiers usually follow) both for the genus Dionaea and for the only species Dionaea muscipula.

5

Hate this problem. Occurs commonly for Rotkehlchen and Zwergtaucher. Brain train. ;)