About the Yew1

[Ante Aikio]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
> identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
> a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
> author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  As I remember
> it, he even discovered one or two new species based on the fact that his
> native guide gave them different names.

> A tribal people would have to be truly incompetent to mistake the yew for
> anything else, or vice versa.

An example of Uralic tree names is perhaps interesting in this connection.
At least five tree names can be reconstructed in Proto-Uralic, and all of
them show identical meanings in all the cognate languages. Hence, no
change in meaning in some 7000-8000 years. (The reconstructed tree names
include at least 'birch', 'spruce', 'Siberian pine', 'bird cherry', and
'rowan'.) The corpus of PU etymologies is very small, so it seems that at
least in the case of Uralic, the tree names have belonged to the most
stable part of the lexicon.

 -Ante AIkio