Hi all,
A very quick reminder that diacritic marks (distinguishing glyphs on characters such as é ü ö etc, etc) must not be used in species names in your papers. This is the code rule since 1961, but I've noticed diacritic marks in binomens in quite a few recent polychaeta papers. So I thought it worth a mention.
Europeans may rather resent this rule and find it unnatural, and one wonders how it came to be, but it's been around a while. I guess the thinking was to internationalise the Latin alphabet in a neutral way. If the original name you're quoting used 'Harmothoë', then you now use Harmothoe, regardless of the possibly ancient date of the original. It's taken for granted the two names are the same and you don't have to point out the change [unless you really, really, really want to].
A condensed summary of the transliteration rules: "Diacritic marks must be removed, ligatures must be separated, all characters must be reduced to their basic 26 Latin letters (Art. 32.5.2). Diacritic marks are always simply removed regardless of the rules applied in local languages, except that ä ö ü in names derived from German are converted to ae, oe und ue (not Swedish or Turkish, and after 1985 also German is converted to a o u). Danish å is converted to a, not to aa. Ligatures are separated (æ to ae, oe to oe, ß to ss)." Also Upper case in epithets becomes lower case and hypens are removed. [Quoted from: 'Guidelines for the management of digital zoological names information' by Welter-Shultes, online at GBIF].
Hartman's main catalogue has a lot of names with character glyphs, but that's fine because the rule didn't arrive until 1961. In the 1965 supplement Harmothoë becomes Harmothoe without comment.
Cheers,
Geoff
