Latin no longer required for new plant species descriptions.

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What do you think about the rule change?

Sic Ego!
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Certe Non!
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Quod in nomine Iovis mentula?
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Total votes: 4

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#1 Latin no longer required for new plant species descriptions.

Post by Comrade Tortoise »

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle ... story.html
Latin is a bit like a zombie: dead but still clamoring to get into our brains.

In one discipline, however, Latin just got a bit deader.

For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled. Scientists say plants will keep their double-barreled Latin names, but they have decided to drop the requirement that new species be described in the classical language. Instead, they have agreed to allow botanists to use English (other languages need not apply). In their scientific papers, they can still describe a newly found species of plant — or algae or fungi — in Latin if they wish, but most probably won’t.

“The new chatter is in chemicals and molecules,” said Laurence Dorr, one of three Latinists in the Smithsonian Institution’s botany department who would help their colleagues translate. “It was heading toward extinction,” said Warren Wagner, department chair.

The change, which took effect Jan. 1, is more than just academic. Smithsonian botanists alone might introduce as many as 100 new plant species a year, discovered either on their travels or in the national herbarium, a collection of 5 million dried specimens housed at the Natural History Museum. Globally, scientists discover 2,000 new species per annum. As many as one in five of the world’s plant species have yet to be identified, and not until they are named and known to the scientific community can they can be protected and studied further. “You can’t talk about it until that point,” said James Miller, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden. “It’s not the end of knowing a species, it’s the beginning.”

Miller is a big fan of the relaxed rule, which, along with another measure allowing species to be published in electronic journals alone, will remove bottlenecks in the process of getting new flora out there.

When he published the discovery of a small tropical tree called Cordia koemarae, he had to write a Latin description that ran to 100 words and included: “Folia persistentia; laminae anisophyllae, foliis majoribus ellipticis.” Roughly translated: The tree hangs on to its leaves, which vary by size. The bigger leaf blades are elliptical.

“The bottom line is that only a tiny percentage of us really learn much Latin and are really capable of writing a grammatically correct description,” he said. “It’s an additional encumbrance.”

Botanists and horticulturists will continue to use the Latin scientific names for plants as part of their work. The same goes for the pretentious gardener who, trug in one hand, pruners in the other, can wax on about the Syringa (lilac), Salix (willow) or Solidago (goldenrod), et cetera.

Still longing for Latin

The Latin description rule was relaxed by a committee and ratified by delegates to the International Botanical Congress, which gathers every six years. The vote, held in July in Melbourne, Australia, was overwhelming in favor, said Miller and other attendees.

But it wasn’t unanimous. Roy Gereau, a researcher at the Missouri Botanical Garden who opposed it, said the Latin requirement served an important role in preserving the link to botany’s academic past. The rule had been on the books since 1908, but Latin has been the language of international botanists since the Renaissance.

Zoologists dropped the Latin description rule years ago, though botanists point out that while there are only about 5,000 species of mammals on the planet, there are at least 400,000 plant species. Add insects to the animal kingdom mix, however, and you descend into a taxonomic Hades. If plants top half a million, “there are 14 times that many beetles,” Gereau said. “Insect museums seldom catalogue collections at the level of species.”

The learned plant men of the Babel of Europe talked to one another through their Latin texts, and even Latinized their own names. Carolus Clusius, the guy who brought tulips to the West, published the groundbreaking Rariorum Plantarum Historia in 1601. A century and a half later, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus codified taxonomy in Species Plantarum, giving science the system of Latin binomial nomenclature to catalogue species: Homo sapiens, Ginkgo biloba, Tyrannosaurus rex.

Gereau, a Latinist, argues that botanists still need to be versed in the classical language. “There are many works that are not translated that remain important to us that increasingly no one is learning to use,” he said.

Weeding out fraud

On a practical level, the rule was an obstacle to fraud, he said. The Latin requirement helped prevent the naming of bogus species because scientist-translators such as himself acted as gatekeepers, Gereau said. “When you think of the size of the trade in orchids or bromeliads, if you can name a new species and offer it for sale, you can make a hell of a lot of money” from eager collectors and breeders.

His colleague at the botanical garden in St. Louis, Nicholas Turland, supports the change but understands how the old rule worked against bad science. “There’s an awful lot of taxonomy done in orchids by people who are not professional taxonomists — some of it good, some of it not so good and some of it bad. There’s a fear that removing this requirement makes it easier for people to churn out new species that are not scientifically tenable,” he said. “I’m not really convinced Latin was a gatekeeper, more of a tedious obstacle to people trying to do science.”

Although botanical Latin paid homage to the great Roman plant chronicler, Pliny the Elder, it quickly evolved into a specialized, descriptive and scientifically precise language far removed from classical Latin. The late British scholar William Stearn, who wrote the definitive reference book on botanical Latin, said Pliny would have understood the work of Clusius but not that of 19th-century botanical luminaries.

The language of DNA

The wry joke is that even with the diminished role of Latin, the argot used by English-speaking botanists might as well be Latin. In describing flower parts, they speak of “the corolla tubular with spreading lobes.” The familiar thick green leaf of the magnolia is described in one encyclopedia as “elliptic to ovate or subglobose, obtuse to short-acuminate, base attenuate, rounded or cuneate, stiffly coraceous.”

As botanists increasingly seek to deconstruct organisms at the microscopic level and through DNA sequencing, the vernacular descriptions become even more opaque, said Alain Touwaide, a researcher and Latinist at the Smithsonian who would translate for botanists.

Keeping the Latin description, he argued, would ironically make it more understandable. “To make these notions understood, you have to create Latin words that have an etymological root that renders the word self-explainable,” he said. The further loss of Latin “is a pity.”
OK, so here is the deal. When a new species is discovered, it has to be formally described. The scientist who discovered it has to submit a paper naming the new species, describing is morphology and proving that it is in fact a new species. Every other discipline within biology has been doing this in english or german (the transition from german to english, by no means complete as a matter of fact, happened predictably at the end of the second world war). Botany however, has been a hold out, and has stubbornly stuck to latin until this year.

I have to say, this makes me sad. I love latin, and it makes me sad that this happened. There are also good reasons to keep latin.

1) Having to go through specialists fluent in latin at the major museums acts as a gate-keeper with an institutional memory. This can weed out fraud (pun intended), but also helps avoid synonymy (where the same species gets described and named multiple times).

2) They might as well be speaking in latin when they write in english anyway considering the fact that most of the terms used ARE latin, they just stop using inflected grammar...

3) Sentiment

4) Connection to the history of their discipline, all the way back to the heady days of Pliny the Elder.

So what say you all with respect to this change?

(Poll option translation, YES!, NO!, What in the name of Jupiter's Prick?)
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#2 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by Josh »

Depends, really. Basically, the article says that in conjunction with the other rule it eliminates bottlenecks and speeds up the process, but it doesn't really list any other advantages.

So the questions are if a new gatekeeping system could be run with similar efficiency, and what the encumbrance latin brings to the system is. I could definitely see using the same language in all things being advantageous. Sure, the proper english terms may be cumbersome, but aren't they routinely used by the specialists already in their daily work?
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#3 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by Charon »

I'm torn on this.

On the one hand, every time the zombie language gets kicked down another peg I always have a minor celebration.

On the other hand, I plan on one day being a linguist, and I recognize that pretty much the only damn reason we know as much about latin as we do is because of traditions like this.

All in all, I'm gonna mark this down as a good thing. Rome is dead, latin is dead, move on.
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#4 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by General Havoc »

Charon wrote:Rome is dead, latin is dead, move on.
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#5 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by Batman »

Whatever that may mean. And I'm sorry, I fail to see the problem. So now new species can be labeled in languages ordinary people actually understand. What was the great advantage of using those latin designations that nobody outside the scientific community (and I venture few of those inside unless writing papers about it, and even then mostly in parentheses) used anyway?
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#6 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by General Havoc »

I doubt that anyone is actually arguing that submitting botany papers in Latin makes our understanding of the natural world better, but I would imagine most of the people who oppose this change do so because it is an ancient tradition tied to the history of botanical studies in the western world.

A lot of traditions in the world no longer have much in the way of practical purpose. Perhaps this one's more trouble than it's worth anymore, but that's a far cry from insinuating that everyone who likes Latin should move on. One could, after all, claim the same about a great many subjects.
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#7 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by Charon »

It's fine to like Latin. God knows I like a lot more esoteric shit than that, and it wasn't my intent to imply that it's not cool to have an interest in Latin. Nor that one should not learn Latin. People learning dead languages is the only thing that keeps them ticking.

My intent was that as Latin is a dead language, it should not be *required* for fields outside of linguistics, religion, history and other such fields where the study of the language or the people who spoke it is directly applied.

EDIT: Because the first draft was nearly incomprehensible.
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#8 Re: Latin no longer required for new plant species descripti

Post by Comrade Tortoise »

So now new species can be labeled in languages ordinary people actually understand
No. The names are still in Latin. The full paper describing the species characteristics however, will be in english.

The names are still in latin for a very good reason. Common regional names suck. Depending on where you are, you will have eight different names to know, and they overlap between species. There are for example, something like 5 species of fire salamander, but they are all called fire salamanders. Hellbenders have three or four different common names, and dont even get me started on the plants.

The binomial latin names allow us to be absolutely sure what we are talking about. So when I use the term Triturus helveticus there is only species of salamander I could be referring to. Were I to use the term Smooth Newt however... not so much.

Having the full papers in latin however, does have some advantages. First, there is an advantage to having one common language that persists through time. When I need to describe a new species, I have to read all the old description papers to make sure I am not synonymizing an already described species (describing and naming the same species twice), and to figure out what the new species is most related to. In zoology, this is a pain in the ass because the common language for doing this has gone through periods where it switches from latin to french to german to english. If I need to describe a new salamander for example, I have to go back and read all the papers describing other species in that genus, and some of those go back a while. For Triturus species for example, I have to search through an archive and find papers written in all four of those languages. Picking a language and sticking with it like the botanists did with latin means I have to learn one new language instead of three.
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