Latin, a side issue

[Thomas G. Lammers]

At 05:16 PM 03-07-99 -0700, you wrote:

>Accepting, at least for now, that we shall be required to give diargnoses
>in Latin - and preferably the whole description in Latin, how much do we
>pay our colleagues who do the translation for us.  I did have Latin in
>school, 5 long years of it.  I do not feel competent to write a Latin
>description. The validity of this feeling has been supported by (1)
>listening to two Latin scholars (one of whom, Bernard Boivin, wrote his
>doctoral dissertation in Latin because Harvard would not accept French)
>argue over how one of my descriptions should be worded and (2) having
>begged one of the classics faculty at this university to correct a
>description that I had written with Stearn in hand (I am NOT casting
>aspersions on Stearn).

The point is, you are NOT writing diagnoses for Latin scholars.  You are
writing them for other botanists, who usually have nothing more than Stearn
to rely on themselves.  The results may be barbaric to those schooled in
Virgil and Cicero, but as long as it is understandable toi the intended
audience, that is what counts.  More importantly, if the diagnosis becomes
TOO elegant, it may go right over the heads of your botanical audience.
Pearls before swine, if you'll forgive me.  Most of us are used to looking
at a noun with a string of descriptive phrases in ablative case, followed by
the verbs "est" or "differt".  Get much fancier than that, and we start
getting lost.

>Some of us have expressed concern in the past by the fact that people
>expect identifications for free.  I am curious: How much are people paying
>for Latin translations - or being paid?

I reiterate my statement: any taxonomist can, with patience,  write
serviceable Latin diagnoses using Stearn as a cookbook.  Period.

Thomas G. Lammers

Classification, Nomenclature, Phylogeny and Biogeography
of the Campanulaceae, s. lat.

Department of Botany
Field Museum of Natural History
Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60605-2496 USA

e-mail:    tlammers at fmnh.org
office:          312-922-9410 ext. 317 (voice-mail)
fax:                312-427-2530

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"The most important thing to learn is how
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