: I think you have "race" confused with
: "specie" here. The Bruig, I think, are a
: seperate race from the Province, but only in the same
: way that the Caucasians are a seperate race from the
: Slavs. They are still human.
-Singular of 'species' is, in fact, 'species'.
-There is considerable debate in certain circles over this, but it seems largely the case that species boundaries are not firm and objective, but subjective and primarily defined in use. Furthermore, many biologists claim that, strictly speaking, homo sapiens sapiens could be sub-divided into different sub-species (would it be sub-sub-species by then? I've lost count), but that there are strong sociological reasons NOT to do so, and no great scientific gain to be made from it. But if Martians, say, were classifying homo sapiens they might classify what we call different races as different species.
Of course, Martians may have a great number of different ways of classifying organisms, but that's the point, after all.
So it's natural (or should I say, impossible not) to confuse race with species, because the terms themselves are fuzzy and inherently confusing. Whether you choose one or the other term is based on what you plan to do with those terms, not an underlying objectivity of it (contra Aristotle, for example, who thought you could define species by defining their essences: e.g., man = rational animal; dog = barking, four-legged companion with tongue; etc.). In reality, all we have, even ideally, is a gigantic tree of individuals and their descendants, and we draw more or less defined circles around groups of descendents and give them names like fish or mammal, but we're puzzled by the lungfish and countless other counterexample individuals that live along the edges of our defining circles.
