Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
I come to bury Latin, not to praise it.
Salve amicis!
Ego et Julius, hoc est DNuntii.
As you can tell by my pronunciation, grammar, and word choice, I am among the select seven
or so billion people who do not speak Latin as a primary language.
In fact, everybody says that Latin is a dead language, and nobody speaks it, outside of
extracurricular clubs really just designed to show off how smart everyone in the club
is.
Pfft, buccones.
But that’s not exactly true, as we in the science, medicine, law, and education biz
know very very well.
Latin is still regularly used in all of these disciplines, mostly for descriptions of things.
So, while Latin is definitely dead, it isn’t extinct, which is the term we use for languages
which have no speakers or continued usage.
In fact, Latin is kind of a “victus mortuus”, or uhh… zombie language.
It’s dead, but lives on in describing animal species, parts of the body, legal principles,
debate tactics, and a lot more.
But… why?
Why do we use “Ursus maritimus” instead of “polar bear”?
Well, the answer is multifaceted, as these things usually are.
But let’s start with Catholicism.
See, around the fourth Century, a craze was sweeping the Ancient Roman Empire and
all the kids were calling it Christianity.
This ultimately led to the formation of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Church was a huge fan of Latin, largely because that’s what the common man spoke
and that was their target audience.
Over time, Latin was promoted as being the language of religion and knowledge, and since
it was before the age of tweeting, everything written down was pretty dang important.
Scientific and medical discoveries, laws, and basically any source of information in
the Roman Empire was in Latin.
This meant that in order to be part of the educated or religious portion of society,
you had to speak, read, and write in Latin.
But, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin was deformalized and broken down into what
we know today as the Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and
Romanian.
So why don’t we use any of those languages to describe laws or bears?
One big reason is that dead languages don’t move around very much... cuz they’re dead.
Latin is frozen in time, and without major populations speaking it, the words in it don’t
change meaning anymore due to popular usage.
For example, we used to use the word dank to describe your cellar, not your memes.
But “ursus maritimus” will likely always be the Latin name for those carnivorous white
monsters roaming around the Arctic Circle, whereas “polar bear” could be, and probably
is, a slang term for a weird sexual act.
I don’t know, someone look it up on Urban Dictionary.
Actually, don’t.
And this makes scientific naming and notation particularly standardized, even when we discover
new things to be named.
All species have a two-part scientific designation, called "binomial nomenclature", or its “Latin
name”.
The application of these names is governed by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature
(ICZN) and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN).
The first name is called the “generic epithet” and is usually the genus, while the second
is a “specific epithet” or the species.
Sometimes there is even a third name for a subspecies included.
So, we, “homo sapiens” are of the genus Homo, meaning “man”, which also includes
Neanderthals and other hominids, but specifically we are “sapiens”, meaning “wise”.
As a group, we are “wise men” and women, of course.
An advantage of using a dead language is that it doesn’t favor any particular group; it
is decidedly neutral, which is great for things like law and medicine.
If we call a disease “grossitosis” while another culture calls it “awesomeitis”
you’re going to end up with different reactions by doctors and the public for the same disease.
Calling it simply “pneumonia”, removes any confusion or bias.
Dead languages might be dead, but just ‘cause something is dead doesn’t mean it isn’t
amazing, influential, and widely respected.
Like Harambe, whose latin name is “gorilla gorilla gorilla”.
Rest In Peace.
If you want to know a little more about how and why Latin turned into a bunch of other
languages, and what killed it in the first place, you can keep watching me talk about
Latin in this video on Seeker Daily.
If you found a new species, what would you name it?
Let us know in the comments and don't forget to like
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