Common Name - Coining Common Names

Coining Common Names

The Latinized names used in scientific binomial nomenclature can be difficult for laymen to learn, remember, and pronounce, therefore in such books as field guides, biologists have coined and published lists of coined common names. On occasion, the common names are simply an attempt to translate the Latinized name into English. Such translation is sometimes confusingly inaccurate, for example, gratiosus does not mean "gracile" and gracilis does not mean "graceful".

The practice of coining common names has long been discouraged; de Candolle's Laws of Botanical Nomenclature, 1868, the non-binding recommendations that form the basis of the modern (now binding) International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants contains the following:

Art. 68. Every friend of science ought to be opposed to the introduction into a modern language of names of plants that are not already there, unless they are derived from a Latin botanical name that has undergone but a slight alteration. ... ought the fabrication of names termed vulgar names, totally different from Latin ones, to be proscribed. The public to whom they are addressed derive no advantage from them, because they are novelties. Lindley's work, The Vegetable Kingdom, would have been better relished in England had not the author introduced into it so many new English names, that are to be found in no dictionary, and that do not preclude the necessity of learning with what Latin names they are synonymous. A tolerable idea may be given of the danger of too great a multiplicity of vulgar names, by imagining what geography would be, or, for instance, the Post-office administration, supposing every town had a totally different name in every language.

Various bodies, and the authors of many technical and semi-technical books, do not simply adapt existing common names for various organisms; they try to coin (and put into common use) comprehensive, useful, authoritative, and standardised lists of new names. The purpose typically is:

• to create names from scratch where no common names exist
• to impose a particular choice of name where there is more than one common name
• to improve existing common names
• to replace them with names that conform more to the relatedness of the organisms

Other attempts to reconcile differences between widely separated regions, traditions and languages, by arbitrarily imposing nomenclature, sometimes have narrow perspectives and unfortunate outcomes. For example, members of the genus Burhinus occur in Australia, Southern Africa, Eurasia, and South America. A recent trend in field manuals and bird lists is to use the name "thick-knee" for members of the genus. This, in spite of the fact that the majority of the species occur in non-English-speaking regions and have various common names, not always English. For example "Dikkop" is the centuries-old South African vernacular name for their two local species: Burhinus capensis is the (Cape dikkop or “gewone dikkop”, not to mention the presumably much older Zulu name “umBangaqhwa”). Burhinus vermiculatus is the "water dikkop". The thick joints in question are not even in fact the birds’ knees, but the intertarsal joints—in lay terms the ankles. Furthermore, not all species in the genus have “thick knees”, so the thickness of the "knees" of some species is not of clearly descriptive significance. The family Burhinidae has members that have various common names even in English, including “Stone curlews”, so the choice of the name “thick-knees” is not easy to defend, and yet the attempt to impose it continues.