Name: 科学がラテン語をいかにして存続させているか (How Science Is Keeping Latin Alive)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:34:08.000Z
Duration: 4 min 28 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!

As you can tell by my pronunciation, grammar, and word choice, I am among the select seven

or so billion people who do not speak Latin as a primary language.

In fact, everybody says that Latin is a dead language, and nobody speaks it, outside of

extracurricular clubs really just designed to show off how smart everyone in the club

But that’s not exactly true, as we in the science, medicine, law, and education biz

Latin is still regularly used in all of these disciplines, mostly for descriptions of things.

So, while Latin is definitely dead, it isn’t extinct, which is the term we use for languages

which have no speakers or continued usage.

In fact, Latin is kind of a “victus mortuus”, or uhh… zombie language.

It’s dead, but lives on in describing animal species, parts of the body, legal principles,

Why do we use “Ursus maritimus” instead of “polar bear”?

Well, the answer is multifaceted, as these things usually are.

See, around the fourth Century, a craze was sweeping the Ancient Roman Empire and

all the kids were calling it Christianity.

This ultimately led to the formation of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Church was a huge fan of Latin, largely because that’s what the common man spoke

Over time, Latin was promoted as being the language of religion and knowledge, and since

it was before the age of tweeting, everything written down was pretty dang important.

Scientific and medical discoveries, laws, and basically any source of information in

This meant that in order to be part of the educated or religious portion of society,

you had to speak, read, and write in Latin.

But, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin was deformalized and broken down into what

we know today as the Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and

So why don’t we use any of those languages to describe laws or bears?

One big reason is that dead languages don’t move around very much... cuz they’re dead.

Latin is frozen in time, and without major populations speaking it, the words in it don’t

change meaning anymore due to popular usage.

For example, we used to use the word dank to describe your cellar, not your memes.

But “ursus maritimus” will likely always be the Latin name for those carnivorous white

monsters roaming around the Arctic Circle, whereas “polar bear” could be, and probably

I don’t know, someone look it up on Urban Dictionary.

And this makes scientific naming and notation particularly standardized, even when we discover

All species have a two-part scientific designation, called "binomial nomenclature", or its “Latin

The application of these names is governed by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature

(ICZN) and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN).

The first name is called the “generic epithet” and is usually the genus, while the second

is a “specific epithet” or the species.

Sometimes there is even a third name for a subspecies included.

So, we, “homo sapiens” are of the genus Homo, meaning “man”, which also includes

Neanderthals and other hominids, but specifically we are “sapiens”, meaning “wise”.

As a group, we are “wise men” and women, of course.

An advantage of using a dead language is that it doesn’t favor any particular group; it

is decidedly neutral, which is great for things like law and medicine.

If we call a disease “grossitosis” while another culture calls it “awesomeitis”

you’re going to end up with different reactions by doctors and the public for the same disease.

Calling it simply “pneumonia”, removes any confusion or bias.

Dead languages might be dead, but just ‘cause something is dead doesn’t mean it isn’t

amazing, influential, and widely respected.

Like Harambe, whose latin name is “gorilla gorilla gorilla”.

If you want to know a little more about how and why Latin turned into a bunch of other

languages, and what killed it in the first place, you can keep watching me talk about

If you found a new species, what would you name it?

Let us know in the comments and don't forget to like

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