Erin Petrella (Columbia University)
In 1743, Karl Linnaeus declared that a botanist was anyone who knew how to assign similar but distinct names, which are intelligible to everyone, to similar and distinct plants: Botanicus est ille, qui Vegetabilia similia similibus, et distincta distinctis Nominibus, cuicunque intelligibilibus, noscit nominare (Genera Plantarum 1743: iii). Following Linnaeus, the field of botany, relying on the Latin language, assumed this ideal of universal intelligibility, systematizing botanical nomenclature, vocabulary, and descriptions. Eventually, in 1935, at the first International Botanical Congress, it became a requirement for publication that botanical diagnoses (statements that distinguish one genus or species from another) be composed in Latin (IBC 1935).
Stearn (1966) then claimed that botanical names were “international”, and “the common property of professional and amateur alike in all countries.” However, by the late twentieth century, Latin was no longer the lingua franca, and centuries of botanical Latin had become unintelligible to many. The Latin diagnostic requirement was heavily debated, in favor (Filgueiras 1997; Kabuye 1990) and against (McNeill 1997; Kostermans 1990; Chaudhri 1991, 1992). Eventually, at the IBC in Melbourne in 2011, the Latin requirement was relaxed, such that botanical diagnoses could now be composed in either Latin or English (ICBN 2012).
The resulting backlog of untranslated botanical literature, much of which dates back several centuries, has left many practitioners at an impasse, although an online repository of translations of Latin diagnoses is in development (Alves et al. 2012). However, the field is undergoing a new, related debate, concerning the effects of colonialism on plant nomenclature (Smith; Filgueiredo 2021) and the viability, morality, and ethics of replacing Latin nomenclature with indigenous names (Wright; Gillman 2022). Outside of botany, very few texts focus on botanical Latin as a distinct linguistic phenomenon. Those that do focus on showing how to compose botanical Latin (Stearn 1966; Baranov 1972), how to translate it (Short 2013), or how to decipher botanical names (Harrison 2012; Bayton 2020). In the field of Classics, there is almost no scholarly recognition of the value of botanical Latin.
This paper argues that there is an identifiable corpus of scientific literature that can be labeled “botanical Latin”, and that this is far more than the works published between 1935 and 2012. Between Linnaeus and the mid-twentieth century there are countless examples of Latin botanical literature, analysis of which can provide insight to scholars of classical reception, especially in the history of science (Janson 2004; Epstein et al. 2019). Drawing on transformation methodology (Bergemann et al. 2019; Kallendorf 2020), this paper argues that twentieth century botanical Latin constitutes an allelopoietic transformation in which post-Linnaean nomenclature, vocabulary, and stylistics became codified in pursuit of the ideal of universal intelligibility. This process paradoxically resulted in a linguistic system that was the opposite of universally intelligible. Moreover, the current IBC publication requirements, together with the debate surrounding the retention of Latin nomenclature, constitute a further transformative process, which does not assume universal intelligibility, focusing instead on alternative understandings of knowability and the transmission of knowledge.