Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

APPENDICES
These appendices list Wapishana animal and plant terms recorded in the present
study. Although scientific glosses are suggested, none of these are definitive and
they should not be treated as such. Not a single gloss has been verified with
reference to a museum or herbarium specimen, although many are based upon fairly
reliable field identifications. Many others are based upon inference from use of Creole
names, ad hoc descriptions by informants of animals that I personally did not see, or
informants’ putting of names to illustrations in field guides. Variation in usage of
terms was encountered on a few occasions, but not investigated, and is incorporated
here only in those cases where different scientific glosses are reported for a single
Wapishana term. All identifications suggested are thus preliminary and should be
treated as such. They are presented here as a guide to Wapishana naturalists or
outside researchers interested in attempting more thorough documentation of
Wapishana biological nomenclature.
Spellings of Wapishana terms follow, whenever possible, the conventions
employed in the most recent Wapishana dictionary compiled by the Wapishana
Language Project of the Unevangelised Fields Mission in collaboration with Wapichan
Wadauniinao Ati’o (WWA). Wapishana tree names were transcribed accurately, thanks
to the assistance of Adrian Gomes of the WWA. Where I recorded a zoological term
that appears in this dictionary, I employed the spelling used therein. In other cases,
the spelling is based upon my own transcription, which is preliminary. Neither my own
transcriptions nor those in the dictionary take into account variation in pronunciation
that I observed within Maruranau and over the Wapishana area as a whole. I have
chosen to avoid this area in recognition of the WWA’s current efforts to standardise
the orthography of the Wapishana language, and for this reason have adopted their
transcription even in cases where it seemed to differ in some respect from the way
terms were pronounced by particular Wapishana speakers. WWA’s programme of
Wapishana literacy is ongoing, and I recommend that future researchers with an
interest in the Wapishana language seek their collaboration.