(022) Proposal to Modify Article 60.8(A)

In Latin, nouns ending in -er belong to the second declension. For these nouns, i is added after the -er to form the genitive singular. Some examples are bakeri, engleri, hookeri, palmeri, wagneri, and weberi. In classical Latin, with few exceptions, nouns of the second declension are either masculine or neuter (Stearn, Bot. Latin. 1973). Botany, however, has feminine nouns ending in -er for epithets honouring women. For instance, one may find in the International Plant Names Index (IPNI; https://www.ipni.org/; accessed 31 Mar 2020) 41 records for walkerae, 18 for carterae, 18 for barkerae, 14 for barberae, 6 for alexanderae, 5 for bucherae, 6 for canterae, 3 for rennerae, and 2 for weberae. Other examples exist, as a search of IPNI will reveal. Thus, the practice in botanical Latin has been to add -ae to the -er termination for women's names. This was not done in classical Latin. It is one way that botanical Latin differs from the classical. Currently, the Code (Turland & al. in Regnum Veg. 159. 2018) does not provide an example of this different usage. It should. The Code should also provide an example of the plural when a name ends with -a. To address these matters, we propose the following two additions to Art. 60.8(a). “(a) If the personal name ends with a vowel or -er, substantival epithets are formed by adding the genitive inflection appropriate to the sex and number of the person(s) honoured (e.g. scopoli-i for Scopoli (m), fedtschenko-i for Fedtschenko (m), fedtschenko-ae for Fedtschenko (f), glaziou-i for Glaziou (m), lace-ae for Lace (f), gray-i for Gray (m), hooker-i for Hooker (m), hooker-ae for Hooker (f), hooker-orum for the Hookers (m)), except when the name ends with -a, in which case adding -e (singular) or -rum (plural) is appropriate (e.g. triana-e for Triana (m), pojarkova-e for Pojarkova (f), orlovskaja-e for Orlovskaja (f), espinosa-rum for the Espinosas (m)).”