Botanists agree to loosen Latin’s grip

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.

Personal Post

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.”