Buddleia or buddleja?

So, is it buddleia or buddleja?
Looks like it's another case of you say "tomAto" and I say "tomaato."
According to Wikipedia, "the botanic name has been the source of some confusion. By the usual practice of botanical Latin, the spelling of a genus name made from "Buddle" (The plant was named after the Reverend Adam Buddle who was a botanist and a rector in Essex, England.) would be "Buddleia." However, Linnaeus (the Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of Binomial nomenclature) wrote it down as "Buddleja," and never changed it. So, by the rule of naming priority, "Buddleja" should be preferred, though the i/j interchange could be modernized as an orthographical variant (different spellings of one and the same name, which has a single date of publication).
Got that?
Personally, I think I'll stick with buddleia. Reverend Buddle should get his due and we ought to forgive -- and forget -- old Linnaeus' mistake.


2 Comments:
My neighbor assures me that the letters 'i' and 'j' are the same in Italian. Can this be related?
Your friend appears to be right, Mr. Grumpy. I understand that in modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, or those of foreign languages, use a 'J.' But since Latin is used in binomial nomenclature, that takes us back to 'buddleja' again!
I am SO confused...
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home