Botanical endings (was Acis/Leucojum)
Jane McGary (Wed, 31 Mar 2004 09:45:52 PST)

At 08:31 AM 3/31/2004 -0800, Mary Sue wrote:

Jim McKenney speculated that the name, if derived from the proper name of
the youth beloved by the nymph Galatea, should be masculine. However, it
could also be from Greek akis 'arrow point, dart', which is feminine (hence
tingitana, etc.). The tepals of Acis flowers are, of course, sharply
pointed, and the buds are particularly like a leaf-shaped projectile point.

Endings are decided based on the grammatical gender of the genus name,
which may be masculine, feminine, or neuter. Usually species names get
Latin endings even if the genus name is Greek, but one sometimes sees Greek
endings -- I don't know if this is an older practice that has now been
eliminated by the Code of Biological Nomenclature. However, it is good to
look up the endings on species names (or "epithets," as they are called)
rather than guessing, even if you know some Latin and Greek. Botanists even
in the old days were not always sure of the grammatical gender (different
from biological gender!) of the names they employed and sometimes made
mistakes. In addition, the gender of a few Greek nouns varied from dialect
to dialect. Moreover, some species epithets are not adjectives but nouns
(e.g., Narcissus bulbocodium) and do not undergo agreement. If the species
name is a possessive you need to look it up to find out if the honoree is
male (e.g., nuttallii, lewisii) or female (eastwoodiae), or plural (Crocus
baytopiorum, where the species is a possessive [genitive] plural noun, not
a neuter singular adjective).

Hope this helps.

Jane McGary
Editor, NARGS