Recursive copy of symbolic link...possible bug

[Jason Quinn]

Suppose you have a symbolic link called "somelink" that points to
"somedir". I noticed there's different behavior between these two
commands:

cp -R somelink newdir
cp -R somelink/ newdir

The second command has a slash after the symbolic link name.

The first command causes newdir to be a another symbolic link that
points to "somedir". The second command actually creates a copy of
"somedir" called "newdir" (the behavior I expected).

Why does using the backslash here force a dereference?

Jason