About the Yew1

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
for a tree native to Europe)... It is very unlikely that a name for this
particular tree, once established among a body of speakers, would be applied
by those speakers to
any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
the name.>>

Quick note.  Allow me to address this in more detail once I get back to my
papers.

But I did want to just point out that "Greek has (s)mi:lax" from the earlier
post is a good place to start to examine the simplification being attempted
above.

The statement that "It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree,
once established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers
to any other tree" just won't work with Greek.

In fact, the Greeks used "smilax" to apply at least four other forms of
flora.  And the original associations they were making appear to be to
carving or perhaps sharpness of the leaves.  As far as, "red berries" goes,
one of the trees-smilax was the "Hollyoak" or "Holmoak", which of course has
red berries, provides an excellent carving wood and has sharp leaves.  The
odd thing, of course, is that there is little or no reference to the smilax
being poisonous in Classical Greek.  When we do have a connection between
poisonous and arrows, it is in words like "ion", which is often associated
with the violet, although there are texts where it is pretty clear this
association is arbitrary and that the word has multiple meanings in reference
to flora also.

The closer we look, in fact, the more we understand that the ancients were
more concerned with wood and pitch and bark and juice than they were with the
modern-style scientific taxonomy of trees (except for the occasional natural
historian) and that the names they actually used reflected this.  More
importantly, if we don't look closely, we may inadvertantly use Occam's Razor
to remove a good chunk of the truth.

Regards,
Steve Long