BALEE & MOORE: SIMILARITY AND VARIATION IN PLANT NAMES


 Similarity between literal plant terms must, in general, be due to their
retention in the languages since splits in the proto-language. This is probably
also the general cause of resemblances between metaphorical terms, though in
some cases resemblance may be due to independently similar cultural
interpretations of the plant. No effort is made here to exclude these, because
there are no clear means of identifying such cases and their contribution to the
overall proportion of similarity is certainly extremely limited (3).


 RESULTS


 The results show clearly that the more intensively managed plants have
higher rates of similarity in their names from one language to the other.
Combining data from all 10 pairs of languages:


 All Word
Management Type Pairs Similar Dissimilar Source
Non-domesticates 441 136 (30.8%) 305 (69.2%) (Table 4)
Semi-domesticates 278 164 (59%) 114 (41%) (Table 5)
Domesticates 198 159 (80.3%) 39 (19.7%) (Table 6)



 The differences between the three categories of plants--non-domesticates,
semi-domesticates, and domesticates--in terms of degree of similarity (30.8%,
59%, and 80.3%, respectively) are very significant (X2 = 146.483, 2 df, p <
.0001). In other words, lexical similarity between the 10 pairs of languages very
significantly increase along a scale of increasing human management of plants
(see Fig. 1).
 The results also show that the type of plant name, literal or metaphorical,
is also strongly influenced by the degree of domestication:


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