Felix wrote:Similarly,
Valesina should be spelt
VALEZINA after Valezina Frohawk, Countess Bolingbroke; although substituting the 'Z' with an 'S' is becoming quite common. Is this an American spelling?
I looked on my own website and found I carelessly had a mixture of the two spellings. I've now changed them all to
valezina, except for image files, which I couldn't be bothered to change. If the form was named after the girl, then
valezina is correct and there's no reason to change it. I wonder if some people thought they were latinising the word by putting 's' instead of 'z' - but they would have been wrong, as Classical Latin included 'z' from the time of the Greek conquests, in the first century, in order to accommodate borrowed Greek words.
I still wonder about some of the 'i' and 'j' names, like
Plebejus/
Plebeius. Classical Latin had only 'i', and the latter form is quite common on the continent - but then again, so is
'dejone' for
'deione'.
As I've remarked before, the International Code for Botanical Nomenclature is freely available on the web and one can check the rules on this sort of thing (see
http://ibot.sav.sk/icbn/main.htm and scroll down to Chapter VII - orthography) but the ICZN (zoological nomenclature) is strictly copyrighted and anyone attempting to publish bits of it has been sued.
That makes me not want to buy a copy - but it would be a fascinating read.
Guy
