Latin in botanical terminology

Year, pages: 2004, 205 - 217

The article that we present deals with Latin botanical terminology. Views and opinions presented in the article are based on our personal teaching experience at the Faculty of Science, P. J. Šafárik University in Košice. We discuss different topics in the article. First we briefly review textbooks containing scientific botanical Latin. Then we outline the syllabus, which we think would be suitable for a Latin course at the Faculty of Science. Next part is devoted to a brief grammatical overview of Latin nouns and adjectives and the way we derive the generic and species names. We also include examples of Greek nouns in their origin that have been latinized and nowadays they are used in Latin botanical nomenclature. We also point out the examples of words, which may cause misunderstanding. Such words share the same suffix but are of different grammatical gender and therefore differ in declension