The Yew and the Native Guide

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 3:24:17 PM, sarima at friesen.net writes:
<< 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.  >>

Actually, no, they are not always very good at it.  In fact, frequently, in
preliterate situations, they can be quite inconsistent in "naming" plants and
animals.

A really interesting paper on all this is, Boster, J.S. (1985) "Requiem for
the omniscient informant: There is life in the old girl yet" in "Directions
in Cognitive Anthropology",  J. Dougherty (ed.) Univ. Of Illinois Press. Pp
177-197.

In the paper, Boster cites a list of studies over the decades that show a
serious amount of naming variance among members of individual villages, and
his list is hardly complete.  The items include plants and animals, wild and
domesticated.

Boster is actually a proponent of the idea that there is less variance in
preliterate "naming" then has been found in many studies.  The above paper
provides a relatively strong statistical argument that there is reasonable
"naming consensus" in preliterate villages speaking the same language, but
they will invariably be limited to only certain members of the village
regarding certain objects.  In fact, there is an indication there are
multiple systems, each giving a different consensus name to the plant (or
animal.)

Factors that allowed Boster to pick out the different consensus names for the
manioc plant among speakers in the same Peruvian Aguaruna village were
demographics (age, gender, occupation) and very much a factor was the kind of
functional importance the plant had to the different groups.  Even among
females, naming or awareness of varieties of manioc varied according to age
and other factors.  Some male groups had names for the plant, some had none.

(For a view that is much more skeptical of preliterate naming consistency
among members of the same villages speaking the same language, see Gardner,
P., (1976), "Birds, words, and a requiem for the omniscient informant,"
American Ethnologist 446-468.  Cf., Weller, S. C. (1984), "Consistency and
consensus among informants: disease concepts in a rural Mexican town",
American Anthropologist, 966-975.)

*PIE/PIE speakers presumably would have shown the same kind of
multiple-naming practices.  Woodcutters may have a different name for the yew
than bark-strippers, wood-carvers, tanners, herders and concerned mothers.
I've counted eight different non-ritual or ornamental uses for the yew,
including pest and vermin control, so include in that group the ancient
equivalent of the Roach Motel makers. (They check in, but they don't check
out.)

Obviously, if this "universal" applied to PIE, it's not hard to see how one
or the other "consensus names" might have passed into different daughter
languages, and how we  have only what made it to writing, depending on who
was in charge of writing when writing came around.

The Colorado Dept of the Natural Resources commissioned a study a while ago
designed to catalogue plant resources in rural areas.  They concluded: "1)
Most plants have no common name. 2) Some plants have several common names. 
This frequently leads to misunderstandings.. about the identification of a
plant.  3) One common name often refers to many plants in a genus, not to one
specific plant, e.g., ...Pine, Fir. 4) Some unrelated plants have the same
common name, e.g., ...Fir..."

This inconsistency is of course the very reason that a scientific system was
first begun about 400 years ago.

But even today the different functional perspectives on naming causes
problems. So  we see in this recent review of the exhaustive 776 page The
Cactus Family by Edward F.Anderson: "Plant taxonomy faces a big problem in
that the naming systems it produces is used by people with widely differing
needs. The botanist needs a system which can reveal how plants and groups of
plants are related and might have evolved while the horticulturalist needs
labels for plants which they will be producing and distributing which will
distinguish plants of differing appearance and attributes."

Probably the most illustrative story is the one about "the canoe-tree" that
comes out of 19th Century Native American studies.  And what it might show is
that modern humans may think quite differently about tree names and the
transfer of meaning from ancient names must be done carefully.  There were
I'm told a slew of papers at the Museum of the American Indian in New York
all arguing about what the Algonquins called "the canoe-tree."  It was
settled apparently when someone showed that the name canoe-tree applied not
to trees of a particular species, but rather to trees that were suited for
canoe-making during a particular season.  I would love to actually read those
papers.  They might even look a bit like our arguments about the yew.

A very interesting piece in this same regard is Boster, J. S., and J. C.
Johnson, (1989), "Form or function: a comparison of expert and novice
judgments of similarity among fish." American Anthropologist 91(4):866-889.

To sum up, with regard to the statements above, I think it's pretty clear
that it is reasonable to think that the facts could be otherwise.  And that
the name for yew may prove nothing about IE origins.

Regards,
Steve Long