What's the point of Latin (or Greek mostly)?
dead man's fingers fungus Xylaria polymorpha
A dead man's fingers (plastic, from a joke shop).
'Dead man's fingers' and 'A dead man's fingers' sound the same. Yet the fungi 'dead man's fingers' on the left has a Latin name. Important to be able to distinguish between the two.
Just to help you get you're head round Latin names, many of my blog posts use Latin names. There is a very good reason for that, and it's not to be big or clever or exclude regular plebians like me.
I used to think that scientists used Latin names to impress people. Actually that's not entirely truthful... I was much more chippy about it than that, I used to be convinced using Latin names was a conspiracy by the educated to exclude the non-educated, kinda like a secret coded language scientists would use to exclude dummies like me.
"Why can't we just call a bat, a bat?" I would say "What a bunch of stuck up geeks, with their fancy pants Latin names" I said that too.
But then I became an arborist (a tree surgeon) and realised I really needed some Latin names.
"BUT WHY ?" I don't hear you cry... Well, because a bat is not just a bat and an oak is not just an oak!
I soon found out there are in fact about 600 oaks worldwide, and they all have different English names. Turkey Oak, Sessile Oak, American Oak and so on...
So you would think that if I just memorised all the various oak's and their English common names, I'd be fine and dandy...Oh no...
Because over hundreds of years, Oaks have collected regional names too. A Holly Oak, Green Oak, Holm Oak, Evergreen Oak, are all the same bloody tree, A Plane Tree in Scotland and Plane Tree in England are completely different trees, true... in Scotland their Plane tree is our 'Sycamore' and in England our Plane tree is what the Scot's call a 'London Plane', you call it a Ladybird I call it a Bishy, I call it a Brock you call it a Badger, and as you move around the UK, somethings can have over half a dozen local names.
This is before we even scratch the surface of all the Spanish names for Oaks, Planes, Beetles, Daisies etc and their regional Spanish or Catalan common names, and before we invite the French, Japanese, Americans and Mongolians et al with all their names for Oaks and Beetles.
This confusion applied to bats, flowers, toads, birds, jelly fish, bacteria, lice in hair and the worms in your garden, or a worm in your gut.
Every living thing you can possibly imagine....has dialect names, regional names, common national names, and they are all different.
Which became 'Thing Naming' mayhem, and it was a problem.
By the 1700s science was in a 'Thing Naming' mess, if an international group of academics turned up to a conference in Hamburg and were asked to bring an 'Ors' with them to examine, the cockney scientist would bring a horse, the Frenchman a flower and the Russian a frog or a bag of weevils (depending on if he was from Moscow or Omsk) and the Thai scientist might bring a Ox on a very big cart.
So a Swede called Carl Linnaeus introduced international Taxonomy in his brand new book in 1758 called Species Plantarum.
It's been tinkered with a lot since then, but his basic principle remains, everything a has a big name or Genus name with a capital letter like Homo (man) in italics followed by a species name without a capital like sapiens. Then you could group lifeforms together and know they were related, Homo neanderthalensis was our cousin.
All real Oaks start with Quercus, all different groups (clades) of trees start with different Genus names, the Scottish Plane (or English Sycamore) starts with Acer, the London Plane tree starts with Platanus so the Scots and English landscape gardeners knew immediately they were talking about a different Plane Tree.
Latin names are awesome. Scientists, Gardeners, Ecologists, Bird Watchers, Pest Controllers, Farmers, Doctors and millions of others can talk across borders and languages about something and know for sure - by using Linnaeus' Taxonomy system - they are talking about the exact same life form.
1 They are internationally recognised, from Outer Mongolia to Hevingham to New York NY.But then I became an arborist (a tree surgeon) and realised I really needed some Latin names.
"BUT WHY ?" I don't hear you cry... Well, because a bat is not just a bat and an oak is not just an oak!
I soon found out there are in fact about 600 oaks worldwide, and they all have different English names. Turkey Oak, Sessile Oak, American Oak and so on...
So you would think that if I just memorised all the various oak's and their English common names, I'd be fine and dandy...Oh no...
Because over hundreds of years, Oaks have collected regional names too. A Holly Oak, Green Oak, Holm Oak, Evergreen Oak, are all the same bloody tree, A Plane Tree in Scotland and Plane Tree in England are completely different trees, true... in Scotland their Plane tree is our 'Sycamore' and in England our Plane tree is what the Scot's call a 'London Plane', you call it a Ladybird I call it a Bishy, I call it a Brock you call it a Badger, and as you move around the UK, somethings can have over half a dozen local names.
This is before we even scratch the surface of all the Spanish names for Oaks, Planes, Beetles, Daisies etc and their regional Spanish or Catalan common names, and before we invite the French, Japanese, Americans and Mongolians et al with all their names for Oaks and Beetles.
This confusion applied to bats, flowers, toads, birds, jelly fish, bacteria, lice in hair and the worms in your garden, or a worm in your gut.
Every living thing you can possibly imagine....has dialect names, regional names, common national names, and they are all different.
Which became 'Thing Naming' mayhem, and it was a problem.
By the 1700s science was in a 'Thing Naming' mess, if an international group of academics turned up to a conference in Hamburg and were asked to bring an 'Ors' with them to examine, the cockney scientist would bring a horse, the Frenchman a flower and the Russian a frog or a bag of weevils (depending on if he was from Moscow or Omsk) and the Thai scientist might bring a Ox on a very big cart.
So a Swede called Carl Linnaeus introduced international Taxonomy in his brand new book in 1758 called Species Plantarum.
It's been tinkered with a lot since then, but his basic principle remains, everything a has a big name or Genus name with a capital letter like Homo (man) in italics followed by a species name without a capital like sapiens. Then you could group lifeforms together and know they were related, Homo neanderthalensis was our cousin.
All real Oaks start with Quercus, all different groups (clades) of trees start with different Genus names, the Scottish Plane (or English Sycamore) starts with Acer, the London Plane tree starts with Platanus so the Scots and English landscape gardeners knew immediately they were talking about a different Plane Tree.
Latin names are awesome. Scientists, Gardeners, Ecologists, Bird Watchers, Pest Controllers, Farmers, Doctors and millions of others can talk across borders and languages about something and know for sure - by using Linnaeus' Taxonomy system - they are talking about the exact same life form.
2 They group related life together.
3 They're updated to make sure even if the grouping was wrong because of past mistakes, it gets fixed. A painfully slow process but they're getting there.
4 The Latin name often describes the species form or habit, big teeth, spikey leaves etc, meaning the name gives you clues to identifying the species.
5 There are higher names that become before Genus and species which link bigger groups together, family, order, class, phylum.
Most of the time just Genus and species are used, that's all you need because genus and species together are unique names, there are lots of rubra and lots of Quercus, but only one Quercus rubra.
Point 4 above is quite neat.
In my second blog, I had a photo of a Pennant Wasp, a wasp with an ovipositor as long as its body, a lance like structure used for drilling into bee nests to lay eggs (it looks like a fierce stinger but it's just an egg laying rod) It's Latin name was Gasteruption jaculator. Gaster = stomach, ruption = to issue forth, and jaculator = javelin thrower. put it all together and it means I have a spear erupting from my guts out of my bum. which tells you a lot about how the wasp looks.
Phallus impudicus the stinkhorn fungus means Phallus = willy, impudicus = impudent or shameless, hence the 'cheeky willy', this is actually a Taxonomic joke, yup a science joke, admittedly not really funny until you see a photo of it. I'll say no more.
Phallus impudicus
The same 'Latin' (Greek mostly) names keep turning up, so after a while you get to recognise the taxonomic clues. The latin japonica or chinensis means it comes from Japan or China.
domestica means its domesticated as in Sus scrofa domestica = farm yard pig
familiaris means the same Canine familiaris = pet dog
dulcis means sweet Prunus dulcis = sweet almond
tremula means quivering, Populus tremula = trembling poplar or aspen (it's leaves have a flat stalk and wobble even in a light breeze, green on top and white/green beneath flashing alternate colours beside motorways as lorries drive passed.
sapiens means 'capable of discerning' Homo sapiens = Man discerning or discerning man
aquifolium means water wave leaf, aqui means water and folium means leaf, like Holly = Ilex aquifolium
Other times you'll see a name like darwinii or hookerii, meaning usually that Charles Darwin or Mr Hooker discovered them. Naming things after family names can be troublesome leading to a white stemmed bramble being unfortunately named Rubus cockburnianus after the Cockburn family, what were they thinking!
So there you go, Latin names are logical, mostly, they stop confusion between Mongolian, French and East Anglian scientists, they describe the species form often, sometimes where it's from or who found it and sometimes they contain jokes.
No comments:
Post a Comment