Latin

[Carmine Colacino]

> I'm an entomologist who has been following this Latin thread. Perhaps the
> proper question should be, "Does the Latin requirement add any real value
> to the paper?".
>
>>From what I've seen of the thread, many botanists include only the most
> cursory bit of Latin because they have to. Take the Latin portions from
> several different papers and compare them. What is their practical aspect?
> Are they so sparse as to be useless? If so, why include them?

I really have difficulties in understanding what "Are they so sparse as to
be useless?" mean.

> I don't buy the "it internationalizes" the paper argument. I'm certainly
> not advocating publishing in any particular language, but I do note that
> English is the international language of air traffic controllers around the
> world. They don't seem to be engaged in soul-searching discussions of
> whether English is or is not spoken by a certain percentage of the world's
> population or if it will be the languague used 100 years from now.

Probably because it doesn't matter. I mean, historical reasons have
determined that Latin became the international language of Botany, English
the one of air-control, and Italian (for some time at least) the one of
Music, for instance. These are simple facts, but do not support any
particular use of any particular language in any particular field.
Air-control could perfectly go on in Hindi, Music in Indonesian, and Botany
in Albanian, for instance, without regard on the number of persons speaking
any of those languages.

Botany uses Latin (in a limited extent anyway), and I notice that the
persons wondering about its usefulness are often native speakers of English,
which I think is very annoying. After all, everybody else makes an effort to
learn English, and, it appears, English-speakers (or some of them) complain
of having to learn not a whole language, but just a little bit of a
specialized botanical language derived from Latin (I mean, it is not even
the whole Latin language).

Moreover, about the usefulness of a language, it is true bad Latin diagnoses
may be useless, but also bad English ones wouldn't be more useful. But there
the problem is bad use (or bad knowledge) of the language, not the language
per se, in my humble opinion.




--
Dr. Carmine Colacino
Herbarium Lucanum & Dept. of Biology
University of Basilicata
85100 Potenza, southern Italy
e-mail: colacino at unibas.it
url: http://www.unibas.it/utenti/colacino/mediterraneo.html