The Names Of Plants.pdf

The Names of Plants
Table 1
Flower part Greek Latin Former meaning
calyx ka&luc — various kinds of covering
ku/li/c — cup or goblet
sepal ske/ph — covering
corolla — corolla garland or coronet
petal pe/talon — leaf
— petalum metal plate
stamen — stamen thread, warp, string
stami/j,
stami/noj
— pillar
filament — filamentum thread
anther — anthera potion of herbs
androecium a)ndr-,
oi0ko/j
— man, house
stigma sti/gma — tattoo or spot
style stu=loj — pillar or post
— stilus pointed writing tool
carpel karpo/ — Fruit
gynoecium gunh/-,
oi0ko/j
— woman, house
pistil — pistillum pestle
ammonites. The large vocabulary of botanical Latin comes mostly from the Greek
and Latin of ancient times but, since the ancients had few words which related
specifically to plants and their parts, a Latin dictionary is of somewhat limited use
in trying to decipher plant diagnoses. By way of examples, Table 1 gives the parts of
the flower (Latin flos, Greek anqoj) (illustrated in Fig.1) and the classical words from
which they are derived, together with their original sense.
The grammar of botanical Latin is very formal and much more simple than that
of the classical language itself. A full and most authoritative work on the subject is
contained in Stearn’s book Botanical Latin (1992). Nevertheless, it is necessary to
know that in Latin, nouns (such as family and generic names) have gender,
number and case and that the words which give some attribute to a noun (as in
adjectival specific epithets) must agree with the noun in each of these. Having
gender means that all things (the names of which are called nouns) are either masculine
or feminine or neuter. In English, we treat almost everything as neuter, referring
to nouns as ‘it’, except animals and most ships and aeroplanes (which are
commonly held to be feminine). Gender is explained further below. Number
means that things may be single (singular) or multiple (plural). In English we
either have different words for the singular and plural (man and men, mouse and
mice) or we convert the singular into the plural most commonly by adding an ‘s’
(ship and ships, rat and rats) or more rarely by adding ‘es’ (box and boxes, fox and
foxes) or rarer still by adding ‘en’ (ox and oxen). In Latin, the difference is
expressed by changes in the endings of the words. Case is less easy to understand
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