list of figures - Terry Sunderland

names have been standardised by referring to the Summer Institute of Linguistics’
Ethnologue (Grimes, 1996)
6.6 AFRICAN RATTAN FOLK NOMENCLATURE WITH REFERENCE TO
BERLIN’S MODEL
6.6.1 The unique beginner or kingdom
In common with many folk classifications throughout the world, in the Niger-Congo
language family, there exist no words for “plant” (Guthrie, 1948; Westermann and
Bryan, 1952; Guthrie, 1969-70) and the classification the plant kingdom is covert i.e.
this taxonomic rank is not lexically recognised. Although in many languages in the
western Bantu subgroup a root word for animal, -namma, is commonly encountered,
this term is polysemous with “meat” (Guthrie, 1948; Guthrie, 1969-70; Sharpe pers.
comm. 2000). This observation conforms with Berlin’s assertions that in traditional
societies where a kingdom is named the word s often polysemous with some life form
class or reflects an overt recognition of function (Berlin, 1973; Berlin, 1992).
6.6.2 Life form categories
In the Niger-Congo language family, explicit terms for “tree”, “vine” and “herb” are
widely recognised life-form categories (Guthrie, 1948; Westermann and Bryan, 1952;
Guthrie, 1969-70; Oliver and Fage, 1975; Vansina, 1990; Profizi and Makita-Madzou,
1996) 3 . However, based on both morphological discontinuities and as a reflection of
cultural utility, a number of additional life-form classifications within the plant
kingdom are also recognised. In many western Bantu languages for example, at the
life-form level of classification, domesticated plants are often distinguished from wild
plants despite shared morphological similarities (Vansina, 1990). In addition to
domesticated plants, other plants of extreme functional utility are also accorded
separate life-form categories. For example, “palm” is also recognised as a separate
life- form category within many folk taxonomies. Despite the fact that the Palmae is
considered a “natural” plant family and has long been classified by Western science as
such, many indigenous societies do not share this view and include only arborescent
3 In the majority of Bantu languages the word for “tree” is polysemous for “wood”; a lexical similarity
that is extremely widespread (Brown, 1977). Interestingly the Bantu proto-language had a word for
tree, -ti-, which was also the word for medicine, indicating the historical importance of the plant-based
approach to medicinal practice (Iliffe, 1995) suggesting that utility has played an important role in the
development of plant-based vocabularies.
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