Sorry, I just wanted to share my thoughts on political connotated names which are still in use like Hottentot teal or Hottentot buttonquail. IOC is using Fynbos Buttonquail or Blue-billed Teal as English names. Why is BoW is not adapting these names?
And it's certainly worth doing Melanie, don't even think I disagree, but it would have been more appropriate, and certainly more rewarding, to point it out in the Bird Taxonomy and Nomenclature forum itself, in threads; like this one, or similar ones; "closer to home".
this is correct. all projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology - Birds of the World, eBird, Merlin, All About Birds, etc. - follow the eBird/Clements taxonomy. typically the Clements taxonomy and nomenclature are updated annually. in other words, there's no updating of BOW or any other project on the fly; all changes happen in major jumps. typically the revisions are annual, but due to database management issues we had to postpone the 2020 release; we'll fall back into a regular schedule in 2021. rest assured that we are on top of the issues with the names of the teal and the buttonquail.
I think it is a matter of ethics whether we should retain such negatively biased names or not. Most of these names were created at a time when African people were not treated as human beings, and the describers did not care whether they were using them to disparage a complete group of people or, as in the case of Hitler, to honor an enemy of humanity. But in our debate today about global racism, it's important to think about how we want to deal with that legacy. And I think a name change would sometimes be the best thing, although of course that's not possible with scientific names, because of the principle of priority.
We had this message in another thread a few years ago where Swedish ornithologists had to change some bird names which where obviously racist.
If we talk about ethics people like him above will be problematic too. But I think this is not the question for the etymology part of birdforum. Here we should focus to explain existing names (even if one personally do not like the name choosen).
Well, I have read on this restaurant too. But I think its a difference when black people used such words (e.g. the Rap/Hip Hop Group NWA or Turks who call themselves Kanake, while some Germans used this word as racist slur to offend Turks or other foreign people). If white man create such terms it is unethical because they are always might be used to offend other humans. And it is equal if these racist slurs used for animals, food, places or other things. Sometimes there are misleading terms like the German "Zigeunerhuhn". This is an old term for the Hoatzin. But we are all knowning that Hoatzins are neither galliforms nor had this bird anythng to do with "Zigeuner" (= gypsies) which is a racist slur for Sinti and Roma.
