From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Dec 17 2003 - 05:55:06 EST
On 16/12/2003 19:58, John Cowan wrote:
>Peter Kirk scripsit:
>
>
>
>>I'm no expert on this... but I thought that species could be transferred
>>from genus to genus as knowledge advances.
>>
>>
>
>True enough, but the specific epithet remains the same, and the old names
>are still "available" (as the jargon has it) though no longer "valid"
>(what I was calling "preferred" in my previous post). Linnaeus himself,
>working with two different descriptions of chimps, split them into
>Homo troglodytes and Simia satyrus (which latter also included bonobos
>and orangutans); when the mistake was cleared up, the specific epithet
>troglodytes, being the older, was retained for chimps, whereas bonobos
>got satyrus, both now in the new genus Pan; orangs were moved to Pongo
>and given the new epithet pygmaeus. (There's now a move underfoot to
>move all of these, plus gorillas, into Homo; I don't give it much chance,
>though I think it's a cool idea.)
>
>Nobody would call chimps Homo troglodytes, or orangs Simia satyrus,
>today, but those names can't ever be assigned to other species in future.
>(If chimps were folded into Homo, they would be H. troglodytes again.)
>
>
>
And that is more or less what I would like to see with Unicode character
names. Old names can remain valid as deprecated synonyms (or perhaps
non-deprecated synonyms e.g. if "Corean" becomes officially preferred
but "Korean" is still in widespread use), and not reusable for other
characters, but should be gradually replaceable by new, correct or
updated names.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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