The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 15, 2005, Friday
Turkey Wants to Strip Kurdish References From Names of 3 Mammals
by AISHA LABI
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, the Turkish Ministry of Environment
and Forestry has apparently decided.
Last month the ministry announced that it would revise the scientific
names of three local mammals in order to drop references to Kurds,
one of Turkey’s largest minority groups, whose separatist ambitions
the government has long tried to quash, and to Armenians, who accuse
the Ottoman Empire of genocide against them in the early 20th
century. The ministry wants Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, a fox, to be
called Vulpes vulpes. Capreolus capreolus armenius, a deer, will be
Capreolus capreolus capreolus and Ovis armeniana, a wild sheep, will
be Ovis orientalis.
Simple enough, perhaps, except that renaming animals is not within
the Turkish government’s authority. “We try to keep politics out of
science,” says Andrew Polaszek, executive secretary of the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. But he calls the
flap a “storm in a teacup,” since the new names appear not to have
violated any rules. Because Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, for example,
is a mere subspecies, it is perfectly legitimate to drop kurdistanica
and use only the Linnaean binomial, he says.
He recalls a more contentious case a few decades ago, when the
Chinese tried to rename species named by the Japanese during their
occupation of Manchuria. “They were introducing politics into the
scientific arena, … and the commission didn’t allow it,” Mr.
Polaszek says.