Publishing taxa in Latin and in print: ave atque vale

Nhu Nguyen xerantheum@gmail.com
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:18:02 PDT
There are some good things to be said about the Latin description but if you
were to speak to any Latin scholar, they will tell you that most Latin
description of plants past the 1800's are full of spelling, grammatical, and
usage errors. No one bothers to learn the correct way to use Latin anymore.
It is accessible to westerners but it is not the same case for easterners.
This is only an impediment to biodiversity discovery.

In the modern world, there is only need for internet access and Google
Translate will take any language into the other 62 languages. It even
provides alternate translations, something that vastly improves machine
translation. Let's not hold on to the age old usage of a language that has
been used wrongly all this time.

Nhu
Berkeley, CA

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Alberto Castillo <ezeizabotgard@hotmail.com
> wrote:

>
> Absolutely yes. On countless occasions THE formal reference is the Latin
> description. Let's not panic tho: it needs to be ratified. I can not imagine
> ourselves having to learn a dozen different languages for the interpretation
> of the species descriptions.
>
> --
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xerantheum/


More information about the pbs mailing list