Bananas and Food Security - Bioversity International

186 Les productions bananières / Bananas and food security – Session 1
plants, which may be expressed in their names. Apart from morphology and depending
on the taxonomic level, names may be inspired by uses for food or otherwise, by resemblance
to phenomena outside the musa domain, by agronomic or organoleptic properties,
by details concerning their introduction, and so forth. This not only means that
ethnobotanical information is important for a proper understanding of musa terminology
in languages, but also that information about various aspects of musa history can be
brought to light in this way.
Every language has its own inventory of musa names, but certain names may be found
in several languages, although not necessarily applied in the same way. For instance, the
highland cooking banana is called by a *-tooke name in many Ugandan languages (a
“starred form” is a historical reconstruction of the present-day reflexes as found in these
languages). However, this name is used to indicate (French) plantain in a number of
languages in southern Tanzania (Figures 1 and 2). Moreover, the degree of inclusiveness
of a certain name may vary between languages. This can be illustrated by the *-zu names,
which include the total musa domain in the Comoros variants of Swahili, refers to all
French plantains in Kaguru (central Tanzania), but is restricted to the French Medium
Green cultivar only in southern Swahili (coastal Tanzania). Similarly, where the musa
plant is concerned, languages also may differ as to the domain of reference of an etymon.
The pseudostem of plantain, for example, is called *-konde in some West Ugandan
languages, but cognate names in Zambian languages are used for the entire musa plant.
Cultivar names are usually less widespread than generic names or names for parts of
the musa plant. For instance, in northern Congo the Horn Medium Green cultivar is
called mosato, nganga or dum, depending on the language (resp. in Luma, Mikaya and
Baka, three languages spoken by so-called pygmies). These names have different
etymologies and different origins. The generic names for plantain in these languages,
ikondo, diko or ndo, on the other hand, have the same etymology, i.e. all three are
derived from an original form *dikondo or *dikonde. This name can be traced back to
eastern Africa where in some languages it is still used for the fibrous pseudostem of
plantain (or for a certain class of fibrous plants). When the crop spread further
westwards the name was transmitted from language to language, as a loanword. In the
process, it gradually acquired a generic meaning and its pronunciation underwent some
changes. The names of the bunch in the three above-mentioned languages, motu,
mobeke and njo (lit. “head”; note that single quotes indicate an interpretation of a
vernacular name), are synonyms and were originally used for the big bunches of palm
trees. After the introduction of plantain the name came to be applied to its bunches as
well and was loan-translated by and between these and other languages in the area.
This pattern of borrowed generic names, loan-translated names for parts of the plant
and independently-coined cultivar names is frequently found in African languages. There
are also other recurrent patterns. For instance, most generic names for musa and for
plantain belong to the semantic field of plants with useful fibres. This provides us with
important ethnobotanical and historical information, implying that plantain was
originally used for its fibres and only became a food crop later. On the other hand,
generic names for dessert, cooking, beer and flour bananas, which were introduced more