And then there is this: current taxonomic practice is itself practice in the
tradition of New Latin. If contemporary taxonomists decide that scientific
names should now be spelled a certain way, how is that decision any
different than the decision in past times to spell some words in ways not
fully in agreement with classical Latin precedent for similarly constructed
words? That the motivation for doing this among some contemporary
taxonomists is to allow current usage to mirror classical usage is not the
real issue: isn't the real issue is to standardize orthographic practice?
Taxonomic "Latin" is entirely the product of New Latin (the Latin of
Linnaeus), not Old Latin (the Latin of Julius Caesar). The spelling rules
evolved through common practice, and they seem to amount to two: one,
agreement in specific epithets, and two, the person making up the new name
gets to spell it any old way they want, even to the point of completely
ignoring agreement and the fact that some of the words they use aren't Latin
at all (Camassia quamash).
Standardizing orthographic practice in a language system which has already
declared that the orthography of Old Latin is not to be followed makes very
little sense to me, and it makes even less sense for the meaning of the
words. Example, changing Penstemon tubaeflorus ("trumpet-flowered") to P.
tubiflorus ("tube-flowered"). And no, "tubiflorus" doesn't also mean
"trumpet-flowered" in Old Latin, unless someone can show an instance of it
being used that way, say in Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
And why not then change Calochortus weedii to C. vidii?
New Latin, being a written language using letters and aphthongs not known in
Old Latin, has no rules of pronunciation based on a language in which those
words could never have existed, and the words in New Latin are correctly
pronounced as words in the speaker's native tongue. This is tacitly
acknowledged in a number of botanical works where pronunciation is given,
e.g. Britton & Brown, Munz's California Flora, etc.
Bob