Chapter 3.14 Concluding notes

1. The uses of plants⇫

Reconstructed plant names in chapters 5 to 13 are usually accompanied by an indication of each plant’s recent or present-day uses. These are often drawn from the works listed in §5.2 of chapter 1, which have been consulted extensively. In these chapters I have made no attempt to reconstruct the uses which POc speakers may have made of particular plants, but it is a reasonable inference that where a particular use is reported in mutually distant locations - and particularly where one or more of these locations is in the Bismarck Archipelago-this is likely to be a use which POc speakers made of the plant under discussion.

One observation which emerges from this work is that a given plant-or similar species of the same genus-commonly has similar uses at widely separated locations in the Bismarcks, the Solomons, Vanuatu and sometimes Waya Island in western Fiji (Gardner & Pawley 2006). This is not surprising, insofar as the properties of a plant itself often determine the uses to which it may be put, but there are also a number of cases where the use of a particular plant for a particular purpose is to some extent culturally determined. For example, Cordyline fruticosa is (or was) held to have spiritual power in locations across Melanesia from New Britain to Fiji (ch.13, §6), and its longtime importance to Oceanic speakers is evidenced by the number of cultivars of the species that are found across the region. Although the properties of the plant-variegated colourful leaves and a distinctive smell-provided the basis for its uses in association with magic and taboo, they do not account for its cultural importance across much of Oceania, and it is reasonable to infer that it already played a role in the ceremonial and ritual practices of early Oceanic speakers. On present-day practice it seems likely that another plant with colourful leaves, Codiaeum variegatum, was used by early Oceanic speakers to mark taboo sites and other boundaries and as a source ofleaves to decorate men’s bodies and cover the genitals during dances.

It seems likely that some of the plant names reconstructed in this volume were not originally plant names but terms for useful material produced from the plant. Indeed, it may be that some of the present-day terms which linguists and others have taken to be plant names are still terms for materials, or generics for trees from which a certain material is produced. Obvious candidates for POc terms that at least once upon a time denoted materials are *bau ‘hardwood taxon’ (see ch.7, §4.10), *toRas ‘a taxon of hardwood trees including Intsia bijuga’ (see ch.7, §4.9) and *dotoq ‘sticky liquids including the sap of (some?) trees; a mangrove tree, probably Excoecaria agallocha’ (see ch.6, §4.3).

2. The durability of Proto Oceanic plant names⇫

One cannot engage in the reconstruction of POc: plant names without becoming aware of the fact that some names are far more durable than others. For some plant names a cognate set several pages long could be provided (such sets have been cut down so that they provide a reasonable sample of the available data), whilst for others only two or three cognates are available, and in some cases no name is reconstructable for a plant, even though it can be assumed with reasonable confidence that it occurred in the environment of POc speakers and that they had a name for it. I have touched on these matters elsewhere (Ross 2005b).

As Chowning (1963) notes in her concluding remarks, a number of the plant names for which we find cognates across Oceania were probably never cultivated and almost certainly were not carried on migrant canoes, but people used the old names for the same or simi- lar plants when they encountered them afresh. An observation that arises from this volume, however, is that there appears to be a reasonably high correlation between the durability of a POc plant name and the plant’ s frequency of use. The evidence for this is admittedly impressionistic and circumstantial, and takes the form of the uses to which a plant is put. A POc reconstruction is more likely to be made for a species for which the sources (ch.1, §5.2) note many and widespread applications than for a species with few or no uses. In other words, plant names that are used more are mentioned more, and plant names that are mentioned more last longer. This is unsurprising: more frequently mentioned names are passed on to and used by the next generation. Less frequently mentioned names are either forgotten or never learned by the next generation, leading to the creation of a new name when one is again needed. If early groups of settlers on Oceanic islands beyond the Bismarcks were small in membership, then the likelihood of less frequently used terms being replaced by neologisms is increased.

3. Where do Oceanic plant names come from?⇫

Tables 14.3-14.9 list most of the POc, PWOc, PEOc and PROc terms (including generics) reconstructed in this book. Omitted are (i) tem1s for plant parts and plant products and (ii) POc terms whose origin is unclear, i.e. the term has suspected but uncertain non-Oceanic cognates).

The number of terms in Tables 14.3-14.9 reconstructed at each interstage is shown in Table 14.1. A striking fact emerges: of 220 reconstructions, 177, or 80.4 %, are POc recon- structions, and only 43, or 19.6 % are attributable exclusively to the later interstages PWOc, PEOc and PROc-this despite the fact that data are available from languages that permit the reconstruction of terms at these interstages, and every term that the data supported was reconstructed at the highest possible interstage. This heavy skewing towards POc is not at- tributable to patchiness in the data, but reflects a fact about Oceanic plant names, namely that POc terms are generally quite durable, and that only a minority underwent replacement in PWOc, PEOc and PROc. In fact the figures overstate replacement, because (i) a number of the reconstructed lower-order terms coexisted with terms inherited from POc; (ii) it is possible that some of these terms will prove to be of POc antiquity as more data become available.

This skewing revealed in Table 14.1 is not peculiar to plant names. It reflects the speed of Oceanic settlement and the fact that Western Oceanic probably emerged out of a stay-at-home dialect network, whilst Proto Eastern Oceanic and PROc, as we noted in chapter 1 (§3 .2.3), perhaps never really existed as the languages of discrete communities.

Of 177 reconstructed POc plant terms, Table 14.2 shows that 80, or 45 %, have a known Austronesian source that precedes POc, i.e. the POc term has non-Oceanic cognates which show that it was inherited into POc from an earlier interstage, whilst 97, or 55 %, have no known non-Oceanic cognates. The latter figure is of course open to question. It cannot be higher, but it could be lower, because some seemingly innovatory POc terms were probably inherited from an earlier interstage, but the non-Oceanic sources listed in ch.1, §5.2 happen not to record cognates. Nonetheless, it would not be surprising if many of these 97 were POc innovations. Wolff (1994) points out how readily plant names are borrowed, and we would expect POc speakers to have borrowed plant names from their Papuan speaking neighbours and Papuan speakers to have retained older names as they shifted to POc (see ch. 2, §4). The only reasonably clear example of such a loan is *mʷapo(q) ‘taro’ (ch.9, §2.2.1). Whether we will ever be able to source other terms convincingly depends partly on research in historical Papuan linguistics, currently in its infancy. However, there is one small pointer in the forms themselves. As noted in vol. 1 (ch.2, §2.4), the POc labiovelar consonants *pʷ, *bʷ and *mwwere not present in Proto Malaya-Polynesian and represent an innovation in the POc consonant system. In some lexical items their presence is the result of conditioning (Blust 1981a, Lynch 2002e), in many their occurr,ence probably reflects borrowing from Papuan languages. Items in Tables 14.3-14.9 which contain one of these phonemes are shown in bold. Only three (= 4%) of the 80 inherited items listed in Tables 14.3-14.5 include one of these phonemes, and in two of these instances–*(m,mʷ)aso(q)u and *(p,pʷ)atoRu - the labiovelar is uncertain, whilst the exact form of the third reconstruction, *qaramʷaqi, is insecure in other respects (§2.6). On the other hand 19 (20%) of the 97 items in Table 14.6 include a labiovelar, five of them albeit uncertain, suggesting that the table does indeed include a good number of Papuan loans-the more so as we would not ,expect more than a minority of Papuan loans to contain labiovelars.

If a POc plant name has cognates in eastern Indonesia, especially in EMP languages, then it is possible that in some cases I am unaware of them, as the available sources for these languages are limited. However, non-Oceanic Austronesian plant names from the sources listed at the beginning of §5.2 of chapter 2 have led 1to the reconstruction of a number of higher-order (PCEMP and PMP) plant names in this volume, and it is a reasonable supposition that many of the plant names reconstructed in this volume for which no non-Oceanic cognates have been found really were POc innovations.

Notes⇫