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Latin is a dead language, as dead as it can be. It killed the ancient Romans,and now it’s killing me!
But it’s payback time. In July, The International Botanical Congress voted to relax the rules that required that all new plant species be described in Latin. This move breaks with a tradition that botanists had maintained since the Renaissance. James Miller, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden, explained why this change makes sense:
Miller is a big fan of the relaxed rule, which, along with another measure allowing species to be published in electronic journals alone, will remove bottlenecks in the process of getting new flora out there.
When he published the discovery of a small tropical tree called Cordia koemarae, he had to write a Latin description that ran to 100 words and included: “Folia persistentia; laminae anisophyllae, foliis majoribus ellipticis.” Roughly translated: The tree hangs on to its leaves, which vary by size. The bigger leaf blades are elliptical.
“The bottom line is that only a tiny percentage of us really learn much Latin and are really capable of writing a grammatically correct description,” he said. “It’s an additional encumbrance.”
Link -via @brainpicker | Image of the Roman poet Virgil via QuartierLatin1968
National Geographic shows us a 330-year-old book that describes the fear of what we would call zombies or vampires. De Masticatione Mortuorum, Latin for “The Chewing Dead”, discusses the customs of the time for preventing corpses from rising up and eating the living. A portion is translated to English:
Our Common People attempt to avert the danger of chewing by placing under the chins of the dead a portion of recently excavated earth, lest they perhaps open their mouths and chew on the attached bands…
Others, who do not consider this a sufficiently safe measure, before the mouth of the dead is closed, also place a stone and a coin in the mouth, so that in the event that it begins to chew within the grave, it would find the stone and coin and would abstain from chewing. Which fact was witnessed in its time in a multitude of places in Saxonia by Gabriel Rollenhagen: Book IV Mirab. Peregrinat chapter 20, n. 5 in Kornmann.
The book is part of this Tuesday’s episode of National Geographic Explorer called Vampire Forensics. Link -via Buzzfeed
Good advice, right? Because you wouldn’t want a typo in something permanent. J. Harker, a graduate student in the classics, often gets requests for English to Latin translation by people who want to get tattoos. He has a blog post describing the various errors that people make when attempting to translate a language that they don’t understand, and pictures of the inked results. The text above translates as “He is better as I appear hated on behalf of what I am than as I appear I like on behalf of what not I am.”
Sander van Heukelom combines typographic design, graffiti and sculpting into unique pieces of 3D graffiti (He uses styrofoam, plexiglass, synthetic resin and wood).
This one above, Quod dubitas, ne feceris – Latin for "when you doubt, do not act" – is probably a concept most graffiti artists do not recognize.
Check out the rest of Sander’s artwork here: Link [Flash] – via Rue The Day!
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