>Paul;
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>Latin may be "dead" but over 200,000 words in the English language derived from it as well as to name a few, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Romanian. These are sometimes called the “vernacular forms of Latin”. Latin may be a dead language but it lives on and is doing well. By the way I am glad I studied Latin and Greek in Catholic school as well as English. Today the children who attend school in this country are at a disadvantage when it comes to learning. Terms like, “you know what I mean” say it all.
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>Tom
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From a science point of view, the binary naming system in biology, based on latin, is easier to understand if one knows latin. The genus-speci designation may be a mouthful and hard to remember in English, but the latin representation for that "little yellow flower with four purple pedals" is just the latin phrase that says the same thing.