I’ve talked before about the strangeness of the ICZN’s official recommendations for assigning a latin grammatical gender to non-latin genus-group names but I’m legitimately considering writing a formal request to have them either change or clarify those rules. like why on earth does it say “a noun having a gender in a modern European language (without having to be transliterated from a non-Latin alphabet into the Latin alphabet)”. that is so needlessly specific
the genus name of an animal is treated like a latin noun, and species names are given suffixes like they’re latin adjectives so in order to know what suffixes a species name can use you have to know what gender the genus name is.
you can sometimes just use the gender from the source language, but the ICZN explicitly defines several cases where you don’t do that, which include:
if the person with naming dibs explicitly stated what gender the name they came up with is supposed to have (fair)
if the name was modified from its original form to end with a latin noun suffix (in which case the gender is determined by that suffix. fair)
if the source language doesn’t have grammatical gender (fair, but the ICZN doesn’t explicitly specify what to do for genders that are incompatible with latin’s three-gender system)
if the source language is “non-modern”, unless it’s specifically latin or greek (why?)
if the source language doesn’t use the latin alphabet, unless it’s specifically ancient greek (why?)
if the source language isn’t “european” (what?)
if an eastern european zoologist gives a genus a name borrowed from some grammatically feminine serbo-croatian noun, explicitly stating that it’s meant to be serbo-croatian but not saying what gender the name is supposed to have (thus letting the default rules apply), the rules outlined by the ICZN imply that future species discovered in this genus have to have names that are feminine if and only if serbo-croatian counts as a modern european language that natively uses the latin alphabet, but otherwise it would default to masculine.
I cannot imagine the organization that thinks banning people from naming a beetle after hitler would be too political would have a sensible resolution to this naming conflict if it ever happens.
ALT