I didn't look at this before but here is the relevant part of the entry on Malmgren from BEMON
http://www.bemon.loven.gu.se/petymol.m.html
Dr. Anders Johan Malmgren, 1834-97 Finnish-Swedish zoologist
... Several of his created taxon names are a bit difficult to understand from where he got them, but likely he had read much old Greek history and liked old female lyrical poets, because he used generic names like Praxilla (however preoccupied, so Verrill (q.v.) later changed it to Praxillella), likely from the female poet from Sikyon by that name from around 500 b.C., and his two generic names Melinna and Samytha, seem to be two female figures in the now only fragmentarily known lyrical poetry of the Greek female poet Nossis' from Lokri, Italy, (who lived around 300 years BC.) and his genus name Enipo Malmgren, 1865 must be in honour of the presumed mother Enipo (a slave woman) of the soldier poet Archilochos from Paros, living around 680-645 BC
This background is not hard to find - obviously - in the age of Google. Please take care with name creation.
A naming thing the authors did get right was to state explicitly the gender of the new genus. This is helpful. It's recommendation 30A in the Code that this is done. It becomes significant if adjectival name endings need gender-agreement when recombined to a different genus (Yes it's archaic & irritating, but not likely to go away).
Geoff Read
From: Geoff Read
Sent: Tuesday, 20 September 2016 1:08 p.m.
To: 'annelida from net.bio.net' <annelida from net.bio.net>
Subject: Malmgren and Samytha
Dear all,
This is not of momentous importance but I would like to clarify some etymology. A new genus, Paramytha is proposed (not yet Code valid, but that is a discussion for another day) and the authors incorrectly state the etymology is "based on the stem "amytha" as commonly used in ampharetid nomenclature". There's no comment on what 'amytha' might mean or where it came from, which is what you want to know in an etymology. And there's a good reason for that.
The original name is actually Samytha, as used by Malmgren, 1866. It is unstated by Malmgren, but it seems at the time he was using transliterated ancient Greek names of women for genera. Ampharete (the base of the family name), Samytha, and Melinna are Greek female names used in the same work. Later Benham created Amythas, and stated that name is formed by transfer of the initial "S" of Samytha to the end. There is no "amytha" as a name basis used in the ampharetids. Instead we have the Samytha-based names of Amphi/samytha, Eu/samytha, Micro/samytha, Neo/samytha. There is also Samyth/ella, and Samyth/opsis
Melinna is still in use as a girl's name - I don't think Samytha is.
Cheers,
Geoff
