[...] although most people consider London Pride to be one plant, Saxifraga x Urbium, the name actually encompases the whole Gymnopera group of saxifrages. This includes four species with sub-species for each, plus quite a few hybrids and cultivars.
Again I'd like to insist that so-called "common names" for plants may be useful in everyday life and sufficient for most gardeners but they are useless and confusing for horticulturists, botanists and serious gardeners. Serious does not mean elitist.
In French the same common name "désespoir du peintre" applies to 2 plants belonging to the same family but not the same genus/species, viz. Saxifraga x urbium on the one hand and the whole Heuchera genus on the other.
And of course one important characteristic of the Latin/scientific/botanical name is its universality. To a French gardener a plant called "London Pride" does not mean anything, nor does the same plant called "désespoir du peintre" mean to an English gardener. Whereas Saxifraga x urbium reconciles both.
PS.- Maybe if all Europeans spoke Latin we would not be talking about the Br****?
How on earth does anyone actually know how latin is supposed to be pronounced? My latin teacher always pronounced 'v' as 'w' - weni, widi, wici - but I think that was purely down to the 'known' difference between early Latin and English alphabets (22 letters to 26? Or something like that) - and his flamboyant nature!
We had 2 classics teachers in school. One would pronounce Vs as Ws and the other was happy to keep them as written. I agreed with the later as amending the pronunciation based on guesswork seems totally redundant (and more than slightly pretentious) for a dead language. The idea of using a Latinised common language for taxonomy was to keep things simple and universal not argue over how things might have been pronounced.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
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