Question

Why is latin used in taxonomical naming?

Answer 1

Have a look at this this example: monkfish, sea devil, angler, belly-fish, headfish, sea monk, fishing frog and goosefish all refer to the same fish. Confusing, right?

Using latin in classification, the fish is uniquely identified as:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Lophiiformes
Family: Lophiidae
Genus: Lophius

As you can see from the examples above, not everyone can understand what particular specimens are being referred to by using "nicknames" or "monikers" in a particular language. The latter vary not only from language to language, but even from region to region. Thus we inject too much confusion into the discussion when we forgo using scientific names of plants in favor of their nicknames. In fact, even within the same region a specimen may well have more than one nickname attributed to it. Or in some cases, none exists at all for a given specimen. Worse yet, two specimens quite unrelated may share the exact same nickname!

It was to combat confusion that Swedish naturalist Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus (1707-1778) developed what is known as the binomial system for taxonomy -- in other works, the use of scientific names for plants. "Binomial" means that two words are used for classification purposes, and those two words are in Latin (or Latinized, at least). You may remember from History class that Latin was once the universal language of Western scholars. And it is that very universality that is still relied upon to bring some clarity to the business of plant classification, in the form of scientific names for plants. So if you plug Glechoma hederacea, for instance, into the Google search engine, by about the fourth page of results you'll see that some of the entries are in languages other than English. That's universality for you, and that's the beauty of the scientific names of plants.