Publishing taxa in Latin and in print: ave atque vale

totototo@telus.net totototo@telus.net
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:20:43 PDT
On 21 Jul 2011, at 10:57, AW wrote:

> One must speak cautiously here. Botanical Latin is not Latin. It has its own
> syntax, grammar and word usage.

ITYM "Botanical Latin is not Classical Latin."

This proposal strikes me as throwing out the baby (a single language used for 
all botanical descriptions) with the bath water (the necessity to learn a 
specialized dialect of a dead language). The latter is mere laziness.

It also smells like a knee-jerk reaction "Oh, print is so old-school, so anti-
digital, so anti-cybernetic." Tell that to someone whose home computer crashed 
and left them without printed backups of their contact lists.

And finally, piling Pelion upon Ossa, let me point out the fallacy of the 
paperless office: ever tried opening a word processing file from 1992, written 
using WordPerfect 5.1 and backed up to a 5ΒΌ" floppy disk? What will you tell 
the judge who demanded this document?

And have you ever noticed that banks do not accept Xerox copies of checks? Nor 
PDFs of same?

Retrogrouchily yours, I remain, my fellow geophytophilic friends...


-- 
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada


More information about the pbs mailing list