From the Origins to the Representation of the Ukrainian Bird Nomenclature on the Internet

Hennadii Fesenko

Information about the author:  

Junior researcher, Institute for zoology of NAS of Ukraine

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5971-7055

e-mail: h.fesenko@gmail.com

Title: From the Origins to the Representation of the Ukrainian Bird Nomenclature on the Internet

https://doi.org/10.37919/2221-8807-2025-8-26

Rubric: Theory and History of Terminology

Abstract: More than a century and half has passed since the first collection of the Ukrainian bird species names of the domestic fauna was published, as well as significant number of genus names. At that time, the same forms of the names of these two classification levels were given that we still use today. At the same time, I. Verkhratskyi proposed a rule that is still used today, according to which, unlike Latin, the Ukrainian species names does not necessarily have to repeat the genus names to which the species belongs. However, for more than half a century later, the national bird names did not become widely used in scientific sources. This happened in the late 1920s after the publication of a special ornithological dictionary by M. Sharlemann. However, this dictionary contains the Ukrainian names mainly of bird species and the families that include them. The names of the genera remained almost completely unnoticed by compiler of the dictionary.
Since the mid-1950s, subsequent researchers have proposed national names for all bird species, genera, families, and orders represented in our fauna. They did not give any priority to one of these classification ranks in choosing names. This continued until the end of the 20th century, before which the Ukrainian names were proposed for a small part of the birds of foreign fauna.
During the first decade and a half of the current century, a feature of the formation of the Ukrainian nomenclature of the birds of the world was that the first attention was paid to the selection of names for bird genera. They are the primary basis on which, in both Latin and national nomenclature, the names of bird species and the designation of ranks above genera (subfamilies, families, and orders) were formed. Thanks to this, complete typification and unification of national names of taxa higher than the genus have been achieved. Eventually, the Ukrainian nomenclature of the birds of the world began to be widely used in Internet resources.

Keywords: birds, classification rank, nomenclature, approaches of formation.

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