That happens quite a lot with Romance languages. For instance, in Portuguese Salamandra salamandra are commonly known as “salamandra”, Corvus corax is “corvo”, Pica pica is “pega”, the members of the Vespidae family which includes the Vespa genus are generally known as “vespa”, Anemonia viridis is “anémona”, Serranus spp. are called “serrano” in some places, Turdus spp. are generally called “tordo” except for Turdus merula which is called “melro” and “merula” in a particular area near the border with Spain, Urtica membranacea is “urtiga”, etc. But for most species, especially smaller invertebrates, there are no actual common names (because they are not commonly observed or noticed) so scietific names are pretty much the norm.
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@jpsilva There are a lot of cases of what you mentioned - same with Salamander and Anemone in German. No, the case I described, referring to the title of the topic (the same names for unrelated species), is that this is a ‘double feature’ where both the same scientific as well as the vernacular names are in use for a plant AND an animal
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Grayling
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Or for that matter, marigold. It can mean Calendula, edible and medicinal, or Tagetes, as far as I know neither edible nor medicinal.
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There’s nothing to like about homonymy - it can cause only trouble unless used in different contexts. As already mentioned, botanical and zoological nomenclature are governed by different organizations and this has led to numerous scientific homonyms. Here’s an extensive list of them:
https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_valid_homonyms
Paronyms can be problematic, too. On several occasions I have misspelled “Micrommata” as “Micromatta” - both are valid genera of spiders and are homophones, doh!
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And when the same kind of crossover happens in common names, it leads to very identifiable observations getting stuck in “State of Matter Life.” I was going through a bunch of those yesterday, and it happened several times. A bluet (blue damselfly), misidentified by the user who posted it as a bluet (wildflower), leading to a kingdom conflict when subsequent users correctly added damselfly ids. Probably the original user just knew the name bluet and did not pay attention to the thumbnail.
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