English names for the British leps

Guy Van de Poel Guy_VdP at t-online.de
Wed Jun 9 16:46:54 EDT 1999


>history, and are accessible to anyone with a field guide to the British
leps


I do care, and I even have a guide to British Leps, But:
I also have a Belgian (Dutch language) guide
I also have a French guide,
I also have several books on butterflies in German,
And the only thing they have in common is the scientific name.

>(and those who don't have this sort of reference presumably shouldn't care

And why not ? But I do not want to get my English field guide and start
studying English names for species I already know the scientific ones for.

>exactly what species are being referred to), and 2) we use the English
>language on this list server, so English names are not beyond us.  Of

You are right, we do use English on the server, but as I exchange mail with
other Europeans, I will use their own language when I can.  But they do not
expect me to know the common French or German names.

>course, I would prefer to see both the English and the Latin names in all
>postings, but let's give credit where it is due.  The British have a
>more-or-less stable set of English names for their fauna-- something many
of
>us are still struggling to promote over here.


We are talking about Portuguese leps, of which some, but very surely not all
occur in England, let alone further up north. I've never heard a Portuguese
call anything 'Moroccan Orange Tip'.
As I wrote before, there's nothing stable about names, if they do not have a
system backing them up. Unfortunately (in this respect), the scientific
names do not only identify a particular species, but also give you some idea
how the species are related. And because there are always new people
studying biology, they tend to discover new things, new relationships or no
reasons at all for previously supposed relationships.
And this is (partly) why the names still aren't stable, but you should
regard this as a bonus, because it tells you science made progress again
when a name just changed.
Some other names, e.g. the combinations Vanessa cardui or Cynthia cardui,
which are both used in scientific literature, tell you there is no concensus
about which genus the species belongs to. There are (to me) equally good
reasons to place it in either of them. But again, this can be regarded as
extra information on the species, and in this case on the whole genus. I all
just depends on how deep you want to go into the subject.
But then, when you want to go deeper into the subject, use the international
convention, as not all of us are Brits, nor Northern Americans north of the
Mexican border (et ne pas vivant en Québec).

By the way, one comment heard from several English-speaking participants in
the NATO headquarters in Sarajevo, Bosnia, was why 'the others' couldn't
speak proper English. This I heard from South-Africans, Australians and US
about Brits and vice versa. It seems that an 'international' English only
exists in writing, as now does Latin (there are more similarities between
English and Latin, either of them doesn't look (in writing) as it is
pronounced, and there are several opinions on how to pronounce it [either],
and it is, compared to e.g. French, a language that has kept its Latin roots
in words and expressions better and closer to the original [e.g.]). So, to
round this all up, why don't you start talking Latin ? ;-)

Guy Van de Poel
Guy_VdP at t-online.de

Royal Entomological Society of Antwerp
http://www.freeyellow.com/members/fransjanssens/index.html



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