Latin No More

An Eden by the Bay reader sent a link to this New York Times article: Flora, Now in English, by James S. Miller. Starting in 2012, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature no longer requires plant diagnostics (the physical description) to be written in Latin; it can now be written in English (the genus and species still needs to be in Latin). Another change is that publication in an online journal has the same validity as publication in a print journal. These changes were formalized at the International Botanical Congress held in Australia in July 2011.

International Botanical Conress 2011 (IBC 2011):
see Congress Resolutions (Resolultion 5) 

These changes are important for speeding up the process of naming and describing plants today. According to the article, there may be as many as 100,000 plant species that are not known to science and waiting to be cataloged. Many of those plants are considered rare or endangered, as civilization continues to encroach on nature. Some plants are endemic to a single, limited place on the planet, and may become extinct before even recognized.

I knew about Latin names of course, but hadn’t realized that Latin was required for the diagnostics as well. I researched that requirement a bit more, and learned that they chose Latin because, as a “dead language,” it would not be as subject to change as a living language. A living language adds words and changes meaning over time. Though English changes continually, it is currently the business language used worldwide so is accessible to many more people than Latin. The move to recognize electronic publication was inevitable, in my opinion. It will be interesting to see how these changes impact the race to catalog the world’s plant life.