l_raty
laurent raty
Thanks James. I will stay with my opinion, I think, though.
There are literally hundreds of adjectives and participles that are made to agree in gender with generic names in this volume and, if I discard caixana and jumana, I see no evidence anywhere that Spix had any tendency to be inconsistent in gender agreement. All the adjectives and participles that qualify the genus Aratinga (or species that are part of this genus) are given a masculine ending. I think this is an extremely strong indication that he understood the name as a noun in apposition, and that we are erring when trying to turn caixana into anything followed by the Latin adjectival suffix -ana.
Also, to me, the fact that no other 'caixana' was ever introduced for a bird would make it really extraordinary that the two that occur in this single volume have completely distinct meanings.
(Not to mention that, to accept Hellmayr's suggestion, I would also have to accept that the name was formed from a word that has a stem that differs in spelling from that of the claimed adjective. I am not against this type of interpretation per se, but I think this would require some kind of supportive evidence. I see none here.)
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PS - I've attached a copy of Spix's Aratinga descriptions, in which I have highlighted in blue the adjectives/participles that agree in gender with the generic name, and are gender-indicative. One or two (but not much more) may admittedly be a bit disputable: when he cites, by an adjectival species-group name only, a species that he places in Aratinga, but that was described by someone else in Psittacus, it's not always possible to tell if the adjective is intended to qualify Aratinga or Psittacus. I counted 29: 27 in the nominative and definitely masculine, 2 in the ablative and that could arguably also be neuter, but not feminine. (In feminine genera, all the adjectives/participles that are used in equivalent positions are feminine--check Aquila, for example.)
There are literally hundreds of adjectives and participles that are made to agree in gender with generic names in this volume and, if I discard caixana and jumana, I see no evidence anywhere that Spix had any tendency to be inconsistent in gender agreement. All the adjectives and participles that qualify the genus Aratinga (or species that are part of this genus) are given a masculine ending. I think this is an extremely strong indication that he understood the name as a noun in apposition, and that we are erring when trying to turn caixana into anything followed by the Latin adjectival suffix -ana.
Also, to me, the fact that no other 'caixana' was ever introduced for a bird would make it really extraordinary that the two that occur in this single volume have completely distinct meanings.
(Not to mention that, to accept Hellmayr's suggestion, I would also have to accept that the name was formed from a word that has a stem that differs in spelling from that of the claimed adjective. I am not against this type of interpretation per se, but I think this would require some kind of supportive evidence. I see none here.)
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PS - I've attached a copy of Spix's Aratinga descriptions, in which I have highlighted in blue the adjectives/participles that agree in gender with the generic name, and are gender-indicative. One or two (but not much more) may admittedly be a bit disputable: when he cites, by an adjectival species-group name only, a species that he places in Aratinga, but that was described by someone else in Psittacus, it's not always possible to tell if the adjective is intended to qualify Aratinga or Psittacus. I counted 29: 27 in the nominative and definitely masculine, 2 in the ablative and that could arguably also be neuter, but not feminine. (In feminine genera, all the adjectives/participles that are used in equivalent positions are feminine--check Aquila, for example.)
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