Frankennames in Spanish

[gaurav]

Luis suggested that Spanish species names should be formed as "[Genus or family] de [epithet]"; he provided an example of Acrantophis madagascariensis becoming "Boa de Madagascar". There are two challenges:

1. We need to de-pluralize the genus name in Spanish, and I don't know how that works.
2. “madagascariensis” to “Madagascar” is trickier, but if I can figure out epithet-to-noun mappings, then I could use this for English species names too ("Acrantophis madagascariensis” -> “Madagascar Boa” would be pretty cool!). I’ll start experimenting on this.

[villanueval]

Spanish has many exceptions to the rules, but maybe we can work on a generalized set of rules. Then, build a spreadsheet with the generated names and I can clean it up.

On plural names:

• If the word ends in a consonant, add -es to make it plural
  • árbol : árboles
  • lemur : lémures
• If the word ends in vowel, add -s to make it plural
  • gaviota : gaviotas
  • rana : ranas

Some words that end in -s are the same in singular when the accent is not in the last syllable. Accents are another issue, but these issues can be corrected manually.

A quick summary of how plural works can be seen in http://www.studyspanish.com/lessons/plnoun.htm

On 2, the ICZN code has many examples (http://iczn.org/iczn/index.jsp) in the rules that can be used to translate the epitets. Maybe we can work on a table of translations to lookup when a language doesn't have an official name:

• madagascariensis:
  • en: [something] of Madagascar
  • es: [something] de Madagascar
  • etc.
• cuvieri:
  • en: Cuvier's [something]
  • es: [something] de Cuvier