Why is the latin naming system used in the animal kingdom?

because if we use different languages will cause common name problems.


example: Gatto, chat, and katze all refer to Felis domistica , the house cat, in Spanish, French and German respectively, early on scientists recognized different languages as a communication barrier. this problem was over come by learning to read and write latin. it followed that latin would be the logical language fornaming organisms.


it's important to know that the language generally used in classification is latin but ancient greek terms are also used. latin is a classical language but, more importantly it is a DEAD LANGUAGE!!


by the way, good question!

Why is the latin naming system used in the animal kingdom?
it starts with an L. i want to say Linnaeus but i can't remember if that's it or not. it's that way because a guy named Linnaeus is the person that classified the animals into groups.
Reply:cause spanish wasn't invented yet.
Reply:I assume it's because at the time it was invented, Latin was the international language of the educated layers. (BTW, it's not only the animal kingdom, but more or less the whole living world!)


Keeping this system (not Latin language, but the binomial structure) has some great advantages.


First of all, it is universal, and each name is unique to one organism. Imagine a European and an American ornithologist trying to communicate about robins - this name means different birds in the two continent. How infinitely easier it is to understand each other when you mention Erithacus rubecula instead of robin - the American guy will instantly know you are meaning the European robin. Other organisms might have many names even in one single language, and to make things even more complicated, some of those names could refer to two or more creatures. With scientific names, in most of the cases you don't have such problems. When you have, it is by unfortunate accident, and these mistakes tend to be corrected - eg. the South African/North American dinosaur Syntarsus was renamed Megapnosaurus after it turned out that Syntarsus was preoccupied by a beetle.


Second, a scientific name gives some clues to the phylogenetic relationships of a creature. Cephalorhynchus commersoni and Cephalorhynchus hectori (two dolphins) are closely related, as indicated by a common genus name (this sometimes turns out not to be the case, but it's the taxonomy experts' job to put species in the right genera then), and more closely related to each other than any of them to, say, Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin.


And it is often the case that the scientific name - be it Latin or Greek or Chinese in origin - hints at important characteristics of the animal. Lacerta viridis, a European lizard is - well, green, and its name means exactly "green lizard" (lacerta is lizard, viridis is green in Latin). However, this is not a general rule - the name Latouchella aliciae won't tell you that this is a snail, or anything important about that creature.
Reply:Just a way to standardize everything, I think Latin was spoken a lot back in the day and it just stuck as a naming convention.
Reply:Obviously because animals SPEAK latin.





Which is why, despite the warning, you are not aware your cat defecated in your dress shoes.





Seriously, it's because latin is the lingua franca in science.
Reply:Because latin is sweet.
Reply:Linnaeus used Latin because as a "dead" language it will not change.
Reply:Because it was common to scientists from all (European) countries. And since Europeans seemed to be a lot more interested in making complete categorization efforts than people in other parts of the world, it stuck.
Reply:Linneaus [sp?] started binommial nomenclature of all animals [he included humans too] by genus and species


scientists pretty much kept that system going w/ the latin names because they figured out and agreed that different organisms might get different names depending on the people that are naming them, and even then the given name of the animal/organism might change over time as culture and language change... so! since latin is a dead language and it won't be subjected to changes over time [eg. slang, new terminology], it's then a pretty good language to use when you wanna keep consistency in the naming system. that way, scientists anywhere in the world and at any time will know what you're referring to when you say E. coli or H. sapiens





it's all for consistency's sake
Reply:Carl Linnaeus was the first one to introduce a classification for plants and animals. It is in Latin because 300 years ago Latin was the commonly spoken language among educated and sophisticated people.


Each living organism has a genus and species name (i.e. Homo sapiens) so that the naming of newly discovered animals shows their relation among each other.
Reply:because, it was then the universal language for biologists-irrespective of whether you are spanish, italian, indian, chinese, chilean, etc, latin could be a way out to uniformly name the living things-for more details contact one mr.carolus linnaeus, now extinct!