On 10/12/2010, at 5:47 PM, Tony.Rees@csiro.au Tony.Rees@csiro.au wrote:
Dear all,
Paul Murray wrote:
A generic name may be marked as a hybrid. It is rendered × Foo
Actually my understanding is that ×Foo is the Code-endorsed version:
Hmm ... . Well, perhaps there's an issue with our existing (software) code.
http://www.anbg.gov.au/cgi-bin/apni?taxon_id=272817 http://www.anbg.gov.au/cgi-bin/apni?taxon_id=40429
There are only 9 genera in APNI that look like this. X Cynochloris Clifford & Everist X Calassodia M.A.Clem. X Agropogon P.Fourn. X Chilosimpliglottis Jeanes X Vappaculum M.A.Clem. & D.L.Jones X Taurodium D.L.Jones & M.A.Clem. X Glossadenia Kavulak X Cyanthera Hopper & A.P.Br. X Festulolium Asch. & Graebn.
Perhaps the issue is that it's a shade tricky to get it right if you have to use the letter, and so we err on the side of caution and put spaces around the genus name. Although a multiplication sign is preferred to an 'x', I believe our powerbuilder interface was written back in the day before all this new-fangled unicode. Or perhaps it's simply that getting Windows to do proper multiplication signs involves explaining codepages to the windows oracle client: a byzantine process at best, and one which involves getting Admin access to the box. Hence the 'x'.
(Once, ages ago, I got oracle sql-plus to work correctly on one Windows machine on the departmental network, but we never did succeed in getting the machine sitting right next to it to do umlauts properly. Our users addressed this issue by inserting html escape codes into the data.)
In any case - anyone looking to parse names into their components may encounter something like this.
Oh - here's some more:
http://www.anbg.gov.au/cgi-bin/apni?taxon_id=257927 xAstackea xAstackea 'Winter Pink' xChamecordia xChamecordia 'Eric John' xChamecordia 'Jasper' xChamecordia 'Southern Stars' xChamecordia 'Susie' xRhinochilus xRhinochilus 'Dorothy'
I think that the issue is that these genera were only inserted into the data in order to make it possible to construct the cultivar name. The genera are not published scientific names at all - 'Chamecordia' doesn't appear anywhere as a genus name except in these records (heck: even google has never heard of it), but Wrigley, J. & Fagg, M. (2003) named the cultivars thusly, so we have to jam them into the data somehow.
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