Imagine - if one day - biologists decided to leap into now, and ditch those dead suffixes altogether. It’s maddening when the genus name changes, and the species has to limp after it.
spinosa? spinosum? Why can’t it simply be spinos.
The ah and the um serve only to shore up the ramparts of ivory towers.
@brian_d the language purists would prefer each individual binomial to be either all Latin, or all Greek but not a mixture of the two dead languages.
Is Greek dead? Referring specifically to the Greek in taxonomic language. Or is it the same as modern Greek? Just asking - I don’t know!
It’s Ancient Greek, presumably not that close to modern Greek but I’d guess with similarities. My understanding is there was some “cross-pollination” with Latin in ancient times. But I’d have to ask my Classics Major brother.
Regardless, both ancient languages have contributed to modern technical terminology such as in medicine and in the natural sciences, including taxonomy.
Thank you for that. Please ask you brother - I really do want to know!
My brother @raystuart (not on the forum) has been studying modern Greek after studying Ancient Greek and says the languages are close – with certain ancient terms falling out of use and other lesser words now more common – but pronunciation is apparently different. He says Latin definitely borrowed from Ancient Greek and Romanized the words but he wasn’t aware of the reverse.
Thank you very much!!
Why would we do that? Latin was chosen specifically to be not one of active languages, those endings are really useful and help remembering the name, making it a bigger mess than it is now is not what we need.
You can look up videos of collaboration of Jackson Crawford and Word Safari on YouTube about history of language and latin alphabeth.
I worked in university libraries in Zurich. I was the - from South Africa, no really, from South Africa!!
Another colleague was Greek, and very upset that Ancient Greek rules were applied to Modern Greek. Perhaps equivalent to Latin and Italian (which at least have clearly different language names)
And yet there is the plant species Krigia dandelion
The problem comes when a species is transferred to a genus with a different gender from the one it was originally described in. For example, in moving from Prosopis to Hylaeus, the species leptocephala becomes leptocephalus, which causes a lot of headaches for databasing and such. Some words like difficilis have only two terminations so they don’t change between masculine and feminine generic names, but would change to difficile if the genus was neuter.
To make things more complicated, most Latin words ending in -a are feminine and most ending in -us are masculine, but some are the other way around. Also nouns used as species names don’t change, so in the example above inquilina stays the same under Hylaeus.
Since 1) most people don’t know the rules of Latin grammar anymore but there are a few who make trouble for the rest of us, and 2) many early taxonomists didn’t specify what the derivation of names was, it can cause a lot of confusion about what the “correct” name is.
Also, it’s worth remembering that at the time binomial nomenclature was adopted, and for about 150 years afterward, Latin was a pretty active language in science! Up until recently, the plant code still required a diagnosis in Latin for species descriptions.
Yes, in science, and it’s a good choice. It’s not language fault that people who rename things don’t know its grammar, thye probably should if their profession is tied to id. What you describe isn’t different from a living language, it’s usually more complicated than what you described.
There’re many probleatic desicions done in early age of taxonomy, so people have to deal with those anyway, even now there’re problems and specific people who cause them.
About databases, I don’t see a big issue if you change the name anyway, yes, it’s mainly transferring, but really, what’s the big problem of changing the -us to -a? If we talk about common names (esp. based on latin names, which are really common in plants), it’s not in question that you need to change the sp. name to fit the genus, because it’s language rules.
And looking at all the joke names, it’d be better if people stick to actual latin words and not some memes that will be outdated very soon, but poor organism will be with this name for who knows how long, if there’ll be no rules at all we will get even more of those and it’s clearly will be even harder to understand what’s going on.
This really happens for common names in living languages in the same way. Many European languages distinguish genders in a way Latin did (does).
When you reclassify Asperula odorata to Galium you have to change the ending, true. It becomes Galium odoratum. But living languages do the same! The very same species Czech name is mařinka vonná → svízel vonný.
Not changing the ending would be like using “he have” or “two sheeps”, you cannot just do it for convenience, it creates something disturbing the language feel. And there are many who still have this feel for these basics of Latin. We are speeking about the selected most basic part of the basics, taught in the few first lessons of any course. In fact, many will recognize the pattern and used to it without any study whatsoever.
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