I never got the English upper/lower case logic - i know the rules and follow them sometimes, but i don't see the idea behind - or what I see, I don't like much. I particularly dislike to use the uppercase I (see above), as it seems to say " I am more important than you". And i don't think anything nation or language like should be capitalized even if it's an adjective, it feels rather nationalistic. German is clear and precise: Nouns and names upper case, anything else not - its a system, not a rating. Regarding the naming of former chinodoxas,scillas etc: I personally think Hyacinthoides wasn't the most clever naming idea, as the "oid" (meaning -like) is usually used in the sub-family level. On genus level it raises the question "if it's like hyacinthus, why isn't it in hyacinthus?" I'd like to add that other fields of science face the same problem: there is a rather logical IUPAC naming system for chemical substances, telling you a lot about structure and possible behavior of the substance, yet most people use trivial names just because they already learned them by heart, that's rather frustrating... Martin Am 09.01.2016 um 07:23 schrieb penstemon: > As for plurals, it seems that is one of those things that varies from one plant scholar to the next. I had been given a critique concerning the writing on my blog that I should just write, for example, Scillas (italicized, of course) rather than the lower case. Peculiar that there are so many different options on this matter. > > Lower case is correct. (I was tempted to add “period”, but that sounded excessively aggressive.) “I walked out into the garden, and, behold, a hundred scillas were in flower.” Use of a capital is restricted to reference to “the genus Scilla”. It isn’t an example of being a “plant scholar”, but rather correct English usage. > The plural of scilla is scillas. > If you wrote a book using “Scilla” when referring to anything other than “the genus Scilla” I would edit that to lower case in every instance. > Bob Nold > Denver, Colorado, USA > _______________________________________________ > pbs mailing list > pbs@lists.ibiblio.org > http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php > http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/ -- Martin ---------------------------------------------- Southern Germany Likely zone 7a _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/