[I've always had a question.,Why all scientific names seem to be Latin.]

[How to bring out the versatility of the old party in this way]

[I don't understand the gold content of the eight Chinese dialects (tactical backlash)]

[Please, learn a little bit of biological classification to know that Latin is a must]

[Five years of graduate students will tell you that all biological names are basically Latin or Latinized Greek, which is an international practice, in order to make the exchange of botany more convenient in countries around the world. 】

There are many answers made by professionals in the live broadcast room, and similarly, as they said, Bi Fang said that the Latin scientific name is not to pretend to be forced to show his ability to be multilingual.

"A little Latin is an essential skill for almost every scholar of animal and plant studies."

"The reason for this is that all the scientific names of specialized species are made up of Latin."

"Everyone knows that the name of a plant and animal may have different names in different places, and in order to facilitate research, scientists need a unique name in the world, and in the end, everyone's choice is to use the binomial method coined by biologist Linnaeus, that is, the genus name and the species epithet."

"The function of a genus name is to indicate the genus in which an animal or plant is located, and the species epithet is used to modify the genus name and indicate the characteristics of the species."

"For example, our most common potato, the scientific name is solanum tuberosum, where solanum, which means that it is of the nightshade genus, and the epithet tuberosum means 'tuber', which means that there is a strange eggplant with tubers underneath."

"There are also plants that have the epithetical word edulis, which means 'edible', such as ice cream beans, inga, edulis, which translates to a kind of edible bean."

"There are even epithets like deliciosa, which means 'delicious', such as our Chinese Actinidia deliciosa, which means delicious kiwifruit."

[It feels like Harry Potter is reciting spells]

[Arvada gnaws on big melons! ] 】

[Damn, then do I know its scientific name, can I judge whether it can be eaten, whether it is delicious or not?] 】

[6 ah]

【I like to eat kiwifruit】

Bi Fang continued: "As for why Latin was chosen, it was not because the pioneers of taxonomy were Latin, but because of some significant advantages of Latin, such as being uncommonly used. ”

Not used often?

Is this also an advantage?

Many people are scratching their heads.

Bi Fang smiled: "That's right, that's the advantage, as a dead language, except for the Vatican, Latin is not the official language of any country, and almost no one speaks Latin as their mother tongue." ”

"This has led to a very stable Latin language, both in terms of status, grammar and even the spelling of words."

"The world's popular languages have changed many times, French, Italian, Arabic were popular in ancient times, German has also been popular in modern times, Russian during the Cold War was also a major language, and now ugly English is the most popular, and it is foreseeable that Chinese will be popular in the future."

【Chinese Popular Praise】

"In the context of the changing mainstream language, Latin is very 'neutral', it is a foreign language for everyone, and you can understand a lot of things by learning one, and 'lack of vitality' has become an advantage at this time."

"As we all know, a dynamic language is updated quickly, and it is impossible to express the rapidly evolving social environment without updating it."

But how can you write something that will be read by people a thousand years from now? Ahem, of course, this change as a hieroglyphic Chinese character should be excluded, as for why, we will talk about this later. ”

Bi Fang paused and continued.

"Therefore, for words other than Chinese, just like Shakespeare's original text, there are actually some barriers to understanding for modern central Chinese people, and the time span is less than four hundred years."

Name something today, and tomorrow the word will become unrecognizable.

This is the real problem of most phonetic characters, which change too quickly, and will not be understood by future generations in a few hundred years.

"Latin doesn't have this problem, and any usage is written in the ancient Roman dictionary from a thousand years ago."

"It's impossible for a family to change grammar or spelling words, what it was like in a thousand years, and what it is now."

"The second is the richness of vocabulary, if we can memorize thousands of words in English, we can easily pass the fourth level, but the vocabulary of Latin is as much as a million, which is more than enough to name more than 300,000 plants in the world."

"That's why the basic study of the classification of animals and plants is in Latin."

[I see]

[Another day of long knowledge]

[What about Chinese, what is the difference between Chinese? ] Fang Shen, you haven't talked about it yet]

"Chinese characters, this is actually more complicated to explain, involving the difference between ideograms and phonetic characters, and even more than that."

Bi Fang organized the language for a moment, and then began to elaborate.

If it is said that a phonetic script like English will be incomprehensible for five or six hundred years, then Chinese characters, as ideograms, have a considerable degree of superiority.

Shakespeare's writings are only 400 years old, and they have created a reading barrier for modern people.

But for the Chinese people, the emergence of such dyslexia has to be pushed forward to more than 3,000 years of Shangshu.

This is an incredible miracle for foreign countries that use phonetic scripts.

The fundamental reason for this lies in the difference between the pronunciation and the ideogram.

The most typical phonetic script, English, has the same sound and characters, and can be read and written.

The Chinese people discovered this problem when they were in the Republic of China: as long as they can speak and write in Western pinyin characters, the national literacy rate is very high, and Chinese characters are not able to speak and write, so it is difficult for ordinary people to learn Chinese characters.

Even intellectuals began to demand a reform of Chinese characters, and even to abolish square characters and replace them with alphabetic scripts.

This cannot be wrong, the limitations of the times are there.

There are indeed many benefits of phonetic writing in the short term, which is extremely convenient for communication, exchange and dissemination, and even ancient Egypt, which also developed hieroglyphs, gave up the pictographic system that had been initially formed because of the impact of phonetic writing, and turned its head to join the ranks of phonetics.

But there is also a drawback to the pronunciation - it is too easy to change.

The most typical is English, which has to be divided into ugly style and central style.

It is obviously the same language, but because of the change of accent, in the past two hundred years, the spelling of some words has gradually changed differently.

This is the result of the help of modern printing, and the rapid changes before this can be imagined.

On the contrary, Chinese characters, which started with hieroglyphs, do not have such a disadvantage, because the characters do not follow the accent and become extremely stable.

The initial formation may have changed greatly, from the simplest mural to the mature writing system, and the change in the middle was very rapid, but it was not a change similar to the phonetic, but a development, from immaturity to maturity, from complexity to simplicity.

After the end of the initial development, the basic stereotyped Chinese characters have not changed much in thousands of years, and future generations can absorb the wisdom of their predecessors without any obstacles, one thousand years, two thousand years, three thousand years, and five thousand years up and down without any obstacles.

On the contrary, the owners of phonetic scripts, before the modern archaeological skills were invented, had only three or four hundred years of history, and some of the history gradually became myths

Even at present, some scholars believe that the reason why China is a non-religious country is also related to its own Chinese character system, which is to worship ancestors but not gods.

In fact, it was not only China that first developed hieroglyphs, for example, Egypt, which was also hieroglyphic in the early days, but unfortunately it was affected by phonetic writing before it matured and was completely assimilated.

Huaxia is too far away from the sound system, and there are Caucasus Mountains and Himala Mountains in the middle.

Even Chinese characters are not just ideograms, they also have a certain phonetics.

Morphophonetic characters and borrowed characters are a kind of phonetic phenomenon of Chinese characters.

This phonetic usage is completely different from English, French, Russian, etc.

Therefore, in the real linguistic system classification, Chinese characters are not just ideograms, but belong to Yiyin characters, which belongs to a further understanding.

Bi Fang did not go into more detail here.

However, there is no doubt about the stability of Chinese characters, and there is no problem with using Chinese characters as scientific names for animals and plants.

However, the original biological classification system was built by foreigners, and the languages of European countries are more or less related to Latin, and Latin is easier for them to learn, so naturally it is impossible to choose a Chinese.

Because there are not only Chinese people in the live broadcast room, but also many foreign friends, Bi Fang didn't say it too clearly, but simply popularized the stability and uniqueness of Chinese characters, which surprised many netizens.

[Rub, it turns out that the Chinese character is so gripping]

[On why a wilderness survival anchor also studies the language system]

[Survival in the wilderness knows eight foreign languages is weird, isn't this a basic skill (funny)]

[Go alone to a 6]

[I don't know kanji, but I feel amazing]

[Suspected of boasting]

[Actually, it can't be said that there has been no change, just like the chrysanthemum used to be a flower, but now (dog head)]

"It's a bit far, I just want to introduce the miscellaneous wolf, the topic was deviated, and I accidentally talked so much."

Bi Fang scratched his sideburns, quite embarrassed.

After this big call, the spotted hyenas are almost gnawing the zebra to the bone.

Fortunately, the miscellaneous wolf was still there, and Bi Fang hurriedly returned to the topic.

"More often than not, both academics and folks, the mixed wolf is called the 'African wild dog'."

"This random name is not outrageous, but even more appropriate."

Like a "dirt dog", the wolf does not look unremarkable, similar in size to a Labrador, except with a more slender body, a shorter face, and larger ears.

On the African continent, which is full of beasts, this is really not good-looking.

It is this unsightly variegated wolf that is also one of Africa's top predators.

Every time they attack, they are almost sixty percent sure that they will not return with an empty "mouth", and their prey is also a variety of antelopes, warthogs, and even big guys such as wildebeest.

"Motley wolves never fight alone, which is extremely rare among mammalian predators, even hyenas, wolves, which are widely known as social animals, also have solitary times, but motley wolves are not."

"According to Wilson, the variegated wolf is the most complex carnivore in society."

"They always live in packs, the smallest of which is a pair of adult motley wolves and their juvenile children, and the largest of forty or fifty individuals."

"In large packs, females and males each have a leader, and they lead the entire pack and have almost the only reproductive rights."

"The leader couple has one litter a year, with an average of 10 wolf cubs per litter, and sometimes up to 20 wolves, which is the most of all existing canines, and it can also ensure that the development of the entire wolf pack can be maintained as long as a pair of breeding pairs."

[Awesome, this is too good]

[I would like to call it the pinnacle]

"The first few weeks of the cub's life are spent in the burrow, and the mother will always be close by, and her food problems will be taken home by the other variegated wolves in the pack."

"When the wolf cubs can eat meat in a month's time, the mother will allow the rest of the pack to approach, because now the wolf cubs also need to eat takeout."

"In terms of child-friendly, the variegated wolf is definitely a model, and the takeaway that everyone brings back from hunting, the children eat first."

"When the children are full, they are the leading couple, and then the other wolves."

Bi Fang's words were quite playful, which made the audience in front of the screen laugh.

"That's not the most outrageous, in addition to the order of the young and the old, can you believe it, the motley wolf also has a 'democratic deliberation' system!"

[Grass, Lao Fang, are you kidding? 】

[I'm hallucinating]

[I don't believe it]

[How can you be so smart]

[Isn't this almost like a human?]

The barrage was full of exclamations, and basically no one believed it.

Bi Fang didn't explain much, and directly talked about the behavior of the motley wolf.

"In '17, scientists from the four countries of Ugly, Central, Botswana and Australia published a paper describing a peculiar behaviour of the variegated wolf colony in Botswana's Okavango Delta: voting with a 'sneeze'."

"They observed that when the variegated wolves were ready to hunt en masse, there was often a strange ritual of 'sneezing' one after another."

"It's not an accident, it's every time, and it must have meaning that we humans don't know about."

"After a long period of tracking and observing, we finally understood the meaning of this ritual – an alternative voting system."

"If one of the leading couples starts sneezing first, the rest only need more than three to sneeze before everyone gets up and hunts."

"And when the lead couple doesn't speak, and the other individuals in the group sneeze first, it takes at least ten people to relay before they set off."

"You have to get enough 'sneezes' for the hunt to begin, otherwise it will be canceled."

(End of chapter)