INTRODUCTION

In 2004, Peter Bayliss successfully proposed (IMA 04-C) to change the two-word mineral name cesium kupletskite to kupletskite-(Cs). In October 2005, Bayliss submitted a proposal to the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names (CNMMN) to eliminate the space in all similar two-word cases. This proposal was forwarded to the members for comments, but was not voted on because the CNMMN chairman and vice-chairman were of the opinion that a more generalized correction exercise was needed. Bayliss then revised his proposal into a wider discussion paper (March 2006) on suffix and prefix nomenclature, which was made available to the members on the occasion of the IMA meeting in Kobe, July 2006. It was decided in Kobe that the Chairman of the newly merged Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) would take up the issue for further discussion.

The efforts of Bayliss coincided indeed with the experiences of the Chairman during the operation to clean up the GQN* minerals (Burke, 2006): on going through the list of mineral names it was evident that mineralogical nomenclature has not always been applied in a consistent way. Many names have been given to minerals before the CNMMN started to draft any rules for nomenclature, and later such rules have regularly been ignored, even by the CNMMN itself.

The present paper aims to give a view on suffix nomenclature versus prefix nomenclature, to list mineral names with correct diacritical marks, and to correct mineral names consisting of two words or having superfluous hyphens and diacritical marks. The names and the name changes given in this paper have been approved by the CNMNC (proposal IMA 07-C, September 2007). Names written in bold in this paper were approved by the CNMNC to be correctly spelled names.

SUFFIX NOMENCLATURE VERSUS PREFIX NOMENCLATURE

Bayliss has summed up in his 2006 discussion paper the pros and the cons of the suffix nomenclature versus the prefix nomenclature, and his conclusion was that the CNMNC should require that the author(s) of a new-mineral proposal should use a suffix nomenclature rather than a prefix nomenclature.

The suffix nomenclature has been introduced by Levinson (1966) for rare-earth mineral species. This nomenclature has been extended to other chemical elements with minerals such as ardennite, jahnsite, julgoldite, meurigite, pumpellyite, struvite, wallkilldellite, and whiteite. Bayliss and Levinson (1988) made a revision and extension to the suffix nomenclature, where multiple chemical elements in parentheses indicate different structural positions such as jahnsite-(CaMnFe).

The suffix nomenclature (single and multiple) has subsequently been used in revised nomenclature schemes for several mineral groups: zeolites (Coombs et al., 1997), labuntsovites (Chukanov et al., 2002), arrojadites (Chopin et al., 2006) and epidotes (Armbruster et al, 2006). Chemical-element suffixes without parentheses indicate extra-framework cations (e.g., zeolites and labuntsovites).

The CNMNC should perhaps impose that a suffix nomenclature be used in new-mineral proposals, but making a general rule of this principle would encounter several problems. The authors of the eudialyte report (Johnsen et al, 2003) have given strong arguments for using unique names...