David Hershey schreef

Hortus Third was published in 1976 so a Hortus Fourth or supplement to
Hortus Third is well overdue given the many new species that have
entered cultivation in the United States and the many name changes.

I would be surprised if anyone ever published an article that traced
the origin of all the common names for Cymbalaria muralis.

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Each to his own expectations. If this was done for other plants why not
here? Of course "all common names" will automatically be impossible if "all"
is taken literally
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About the
best that could be done would be to search all the gardening and
botanical literature to see when each name was first published. By
"certainty" I mean the same detail that can be found for each
scientific name, a particular originator and year of origin.

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In that case sources of common names will not be found by definition.
Botanical names officially come into being (become "valid names") only when
published. Common names usually are written down not at all or only at a
very late stage
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For
example, it is easy to find that Maclura pomifera was first given a
scientific name, Ioxylon pomiferum, in 1817 by Constantine Samuel
Raffinesque-Schmaltz of Transylvania University in Lexington,
Kentucky. In 1818, Englishman Thomas Nuttall published the name
Maclura aurantiaca. Ioxylon was rejected as a genus name, and
Raffinesque corrected it to Toxylon in 1819.

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No, Ioxylon was not rejected. However it was a printer's error, technically
an "orthographical variant", hence the correction. Ioxylon and Toxylon are
the same name, with opinions differing on how it should be written.
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However, Maclura was
retained under the "nomina conservanda" rule of the ICBN.

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Not the technically correct choice of word but essentially correct
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In 1906,
Camillo Karl Schneider of Germany published the name, Maclura
pomifera, which is apparently still the valid name.

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The technical term is "correct name", but "current name" is also much used.
Although not the "correct name" both Ioxylon pomiferum and Maclura
aurantiaca still are a "valid name". Note that it is different for animals.
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It would likely be
impossible to assign a particular originator and year of origin to
most common names given that they were typically in use long before
they got into print.

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Not "likely", but by definition
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ICBN on Maclura versus Ioxylon:
http://www.bgbm.fu-berlin.de/iapt/no...e/APP3AE_3.HTM

Why was the degeneration of bois d'arc to bodark more "logical" than
the degeneration of mercury to markery or markry?

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The word I used was "appropriate", and we went over that already
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The logical approach
would have been to just use bowwood, the English translation of bois
d'arc, rather than a misspelling.

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There is often more than one logical approach, depending on circumstance
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If you can accept common names of
bodark or bodare us, bodeck, and bodock, which are all misspellings of
bois d'arc used as common names, why not iapacho, a misspelling of
lapacho?

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For one thing common names like "bodark" are used intentionally, while
"iapacho" is used only when an editor relies on OCR or on careless typing.
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Maclura pomifera common names:
http://www2.fpl.fs.fed.us/TechSheets...s/maclura.html

Given there are scientific names for plants, then all other plants
names could naturally be considered unscientific names. Exceptions
would include cases where the genus name (e.g. Ginkgo) is the common
name. Most common names are unscientific for several reasons. Unlike
scientific names, common names lack international uniformity, lack
rules of formation, come in more than one language, and their
originator and year of origin are often not known. Also, there are
often many common names for one species, and the same common name is
often applied to more than one species.
David R. Hershey

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Well, certainly you can think up your own terms and define two categories.
For my money there is little chance that this will gain a following,
especially since these have little descriptive value.

As to international acceptance. Many common names are linked to a language
(with US English perhaps a separate language for UK English, etc) and this
obviously will have consequences for their international acceptance. However
exceptions do exist. For instance the wood you call "iapacho" does have an
internationally accepted common name, namely "ipe". Actually this is a more
useful name than a botanical designation, Tabebuia spp, which might lead the
user to expect that all Tabebuia spp yield this wood.
PvR