BULLETIN FLORIDA MUSEUM NATURAL HISTORY VOL. 35(4)


Aubl., tayahu-mira 'white lipped peccary-tree,' is metaphorical since its
constituent morphemes do not refer to a specific plant, and the Wayapi word
for Conceveiba guianensis, a'i-miniyu 'sloth-cotton,' is metaphorical because
this tree of the spurge family is not a kind of 'cotton.' The relation between a
metaphorical plant term and its referent is, in a sense, less arbitrary than that
of a literal term to its referent, because some culturally given interpretation of
the plant intervenes between the metaphorical term and its referent.
 It is more complicated to judge the similarity of metaphorical plant terms
 since these may incorporate several morphemes, and some degree of
 arbitrariness is unavoidable. Two metaphorical terms are deemed similar (1)
 if they share two morphemes which are similar in sound and in meaning (e.g.,K
 yagi-sipo-pe 'tortoise-vine-flat' and T 4wipo-pew 'vine-flat') or (2) if one of the
 principal nominal components is similar in sound and in meaning, excluding
 life-form morphemes or common plant part morphemes (e.g.,T zani-ro-'iw
 'oil-bitter-tree', W yani 'oil', referring to the tree of the mahogany family,
 Carapa guianensis Aubl.).
 Phonetic resemblance between forms must be apparent for them to be
 considered similar (such as iiia and iga 'inga' above). Given the number of
 languages involved in this study, the lack of descriptive work on two of the
 languages, the uncertainty of phonetic details, and the limited size of the
 corpus, it is not in general possible to reconstruct the Proto-Tupi-Guarani
 forms with certainty and then identify borrowings by the fact that they do not
 show the same systematic sound correspondences as do the reconstructable
 words.
 Borrowing, however, appears to have been very minimal. Berlin et al.
 (1973:152) also observed that borrowing of words between Tzeltal-Tzotzil was
 a "relatively rare occurrence." First of all, names for domesticates would be the
 most likely of the three categories of names to be borrowed, yet these names
 strongly tend to reconstruct in Proto-Tupi-Guarani (Aryon Rodrigues,
 personal communication). It is very doubtful that much borrowing occurred,
 since a society would have had to lose the domesticate and the word for it and
 then regain the plant plus a new word. It seems unlikely this would have
 happened often. Second, if borrowings were extensive from language A to
 language B, then these two languages should be conspicuously more similar to
 each other than to languages C, D, and E, but among these Tupi-Guarani
 languages, no such significant pairings were found. There has been minor
 Portuguese influence (K kuyer-'t and T wira-kuzer 'spoon-tree' from colher
 [#11, Table 1], K kanei-'i-tuwir 'resin-tree-white' from candeia [#27, Table 1],
 and the words for 'wild cacao' and 'cacao' [#138, Table 2 and #167, Table 3).
 It should be noted that the referents of these words are of neotropical origin.
 The similarities between the languages for these words probably reflect
independent borrowing from Portuguese in the remote past.