Eggspots Elsewhere - Welt der Fische / World of Fishes

Anyone who has had anything to do with the subject of taxonomy will be aware that the
grammatical gender of a genus name can have an effect on the species name, specifically
when the latter takes the form of an adjective. Grammatical gender is a feature of most
languages, especially those of Europe, and is even found in Old English (Anglo-Saxon),
albeit not in modern English.
The German reader of
eggspots will not, however,
derive any great benefit from
this in terms of under -
standing, as the Latinderived
genders involved
here are significantly
different to the German.
As always where taxonomy is
concerned, the Code of the
International Commission on
Zoological Nomenclature
(ICZN) provides relevant
precepts, and in this case in
particular, helpful examples
as well. Although these rules
occupy several pages in the
Code (and hence repeating
them in full in this article
would take too much space),
the examples nevertheless
cannot hope to explain
everything relevant, and as a
result authors without any
special knowledge of Latin
often make mistakes. The
commonest is that they do
not appreciate when a
species name takes the form
of a noun and when it
consists of an adjective.
Examples of this include
names that end in –taenia,
which means ‘band’ and
hence is a substantive, while
the ending taeniatus (-ata, -
atum) signifies ‘banded’ and is, of course, an adjective. In fact the matter can be even more
complicated, as names that end in, for example, -urus can be either a substantive or an
eggspots No. 4
The gender of the genus Haplochromis
and other –chromis
by MARY BAILEY and ERWIN SCHRAML
Chromis chromis (UW-Photo Adriatic Sea), the species from whose name the suffix
commonly used for cichlid genera is derived.
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