Thanks for the link Richard. This reminds me of Laurent's analysis of a similar situation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nomenclatorist View Post
Xantholoema is an incorrect spelling no ?
It is etymologically "incorrect" -- like Megalaima, the word is formed from λαιμός, -οῦ (ὁ), the throat, with a modified ending: this might be "correctly" transcribed into -laima, or "correctly" Latinised into -laema/-læma; turning it into -loema/-lœma is strange. But in nomenclature, this type of "error" is not treated as correctible.
If the name is available from the Conspectus volucrum zygodactylorum, the original spelling is unquestionably "Xantholœma"; "æ" appears in the same font on [p.5] ("Africanæ", "Asiaticæ", "Oceanicæ", "Australasianæ") of the work and is clearly distinct from the "œ" in "Megalœma" and "Xantholœma" on [p.12].
To make "Xantholœma" an incorrect spelling you would need evidence in the work itself that this spelling differed from what Bonaparte really intended.
(There is at least some internal suggestion here that the typographer misspelled -læma where it appeared in lower case on this page, however, as he spelled Megalaima MEGALÆMA in upper case at the genus rank, but "Megalœma" in lower case at the subgenus rank, and this would be quite unlikely to have been deliberate. But I'm not sure this type of consideration would be likely to become accepted as justifying a correction of Xantholœma.)
