PAGE 2 of 3 Why do botanists use Latin and Greek roots to form their technical names? The simple answer is: 90 percent of all scientific words in English derive from Latin and Greek. In origin, English is a Germanic tongue based on the Germanic dialects of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who conquered Britain. But invasions of and migrations to the British Isles of peoples speaking other languages, like Romans speaking Latin, Vikings speaking Old Scandinavian, and Normans speaking French, added foreign terms to the basic Anglo-Saxon word hoard. Consequently English now has more lexical items, more words, than any other language on earth, a larger vocabulary than Chinese or French or Russian or Arabic. True, our simple words are still of Anglo-Saxon origin: give, man, father. But almost all our technical and learned words have been borrowed, sometimes through Norman French, from Latin and Greek.
This is a drawing of an inscription in Latin from a Roman temple in Chichester in England. The first two Latin lines are: Neptuno et Minervae templum 'This temple is dedicated to Neptune and to Minerva.' Neptune was a Roman god of the sea and Minerva was a goddess of wisdom and the patroness of working trades and the Roman arts.
Latin, Greek & English Words For example, donate is a Latin-based verb meaning ‘to give,’ human is a Latin-based word referring to mankind, paternal is a Latin-based adjective referring to a father. Latin terms were borrowed earlier and are often more familiar than Greek terms borrowed later. For example, didonai is the Greek verb ‘to give,’ from which English gets antidote, something given against a toxin, to counteract its effects, from anti Greek, against + dotos Greek, given. Why Latin? For almost two thousand years, up to the end of the seventeenth century, scientific textbooks were written in Latin. If you were a student at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, or at Bologna, you learned natural history, later called botany and zoology, from books written in Latin but based largely on the writings of early Greek scientists. The first American medical textbooks used at Harvard University were written in Latin.
The Lord's Prayer in Latin from a catechism published in 1551 A.D. The first sentence of the Latin is Pater noster qui es in caelis 'Our Father, who art in Heaven.' Below the Latin is The Lord's Prayer in 16th century Scots dialect.
But again, why use “dead” languages, Latin and Classical Greek, to form scientific and technical terms? First, it is traditional—as we saw above. Second, in a “dead” language, the meaning of a word does not change. It is frozen. Callus will always mean ‘hard skin’ in Latin. In a living language, words acquire new meanings. In 1930, acid meant a chemical like the acetic acid in vinegar. Nowadays “acid” is English slang for LSD, a dangerous hallucinogenic drug. Because precise meaning and precise use of words is crucial in all forms of scientific communication, it helps to be able to make new medical terms from Latin and Greek roots whose meanings do not alter over time.
As you read about the exotic origin of plant names, you will see that much Botanical Latin is derived from ancient Greek words. Why? First, the Greeks got around to studying and naming plants long before the Romans did. So there exists in ancient Greek texts a large vocabulary of plant names. Second, compared to the Latin language, ancient Greek simply had more words, had a larger and more sophisticated vocabulary. Latin is a terse tongue, a language that valued concise utterance. Thus Latin has few words with many meanings. Therefore in Latin, context is everything. This is not as true in Greek, a language with an inherent predilection for forming compound words with felicity, to produce pleasant-sounding and logical names. Unfortunately this aptness and euphony of nomenclature does not hold for all botanical names formed from Greek roots by modern botanists. Some of these new terms are frankly ugly and incapable of being pronounced easily. Yes, there are compound words in Latin, but not nearly as many as in ancient Greek. Stated plainly, it was easier to make new words in Greek than in Latin.
On the next and last page, we look at some categories of plant names made from Latin and Greek roots, at names given to an individual genus, species, variety, and family. © 2005
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