Championed by Boris Johnson on a regular basis and still surprisingly popular in schools, Latin is the dead language that refuses to die.
The world’s botanists might not agree, however. More than 250 years after Carl Linnaeus gave the world the binomial naming system, plant experts have thrown away their Latin primers after being allowed for the first time to describe new plant species in English instead of the ancient language.
Until recently any botanist hoping to make their name by discovering, for instance, an obscure species of Patagonian grass, would have to register an official description of it in Latin.
For the gentleman scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who probably spoke not just fluent Latin but Greek as well, this might not have been a problem.
For the contemporary botanist, however, it was rather more challenging. “My Latin at school finished in the fourth year,” said David Simpson, head of science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
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“Fortunately there was an incredibly good book called Botanical Latin by William Stearn. He was very good at giving the basics for writing a Latin description of a plant. I might have got it wrong sometimes, but at Kew we do have Latin experts who would set you right.”
After a vote at the International Botanical Congress in 2011, English descriptions of species are now allowed as well as Latin, when publishing formal descriptions of plants, fungi and algae. The change will not yet apply to animals.
Nicholas Turland of Berlin’s Botanical Museum said: “Latin has become increasingly difficult to use and is often regarded as an irrelevant anachronism by modern scientists. The meeting clearly wanted an alternative.”
Professor Simpson, who edits the journal Kew Bulletin, said: “As far as I’m concerned it is a good thing. It makes our data more accessible. There are however some botanists, the more traditional people, who feel that it is a retrograde step, but they are very much in the minority.”
Mark Spencer, the senior curator of the British and Irish herbarium at the Natural History Museum, said: “The underlying principle was that English is essentially the lingua franca of science, unlike Latin, and is therefore the most accessible language for communicating scientific information.”
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However, Dr Spencer said he would probably continue to write descriptions in Latin. “I quite like the mental rigours it puts you through. You have to think very carefully about the salient features of the organism you are describing.”
He also suggested that the system may not remain unchanged. In future it could be amended to allow descriptions in other languages such as Mandarin, he said. “Science should never be closed or dogmatic.”
The binomial system of nomenclature popularised by Carl Linnaeus — by which a dandelion, for instance, is Taraxacum officinale — is, however, unlikely to change.
Professor Simpson said: “The binomial name is a system that has worked well for many years.”