![]() ![]() This view has been clearly expressed by several authors, with statements such as: “Of all the medicinal herbs used in the ancient and medieval world, none was regarded with as much fear or wonder as the mandrake” Silberman noted that “Of all the plant illustrations (in medieval herbals) representing mythological beliefs, superstition, or witchcraft, the one that comes uppermost to mind is the mandragora or mandrake.” Mandrake is perhaps the most famous medicinal plant in western culture since biblical times and throughout written history. They use the plant’s morphological data, ecological characteristics, medicinal properties and uses, as well as historical evidence and ethnobotanical data, to explain the meaning, origin, spread, and history of the plant names. reconstruct the etymological, ethnobotanical, and folkloristic roots of 290 vernacular names of Ecballium elaterium (L.) A.Rich. Austin studies the history and etymology of Sambucus to reveal the history of the intercultural exchange of this plant and the evolution of its name. They employ historical, economic, geographic, linguistic (in several languages) and ethnobotanical approaches to understand the origin of the plant and its economic trade route. Austin and Felger study the etymology of the genus Fagara (Rutaceae), from its first written record in the eleventh century through to the present day. ![]() and related narcotic species in Lithuania. A similar approach is adopted by Šeškauskaitė and Gliwa when studying the etymology of Datura stramonium L. Linguistic analysis is used by these authors as another tool to establish the plant’s identification. (and other plant species suspected of being “Haoma”). In addition to historical–geographic analyses, they employ a multilingual comparison of the common names of Peganum harmala L. Flattery and Swartz study the identity of the mythical “Haoma” plant, which plays an important role in Zoroastrian worship. In Serbo-Croatian, “petoprsnica,” literally meaning “of five fingers.”Ī few studies have conducted a multilingual comparison of the same plant species to understand its performance, perception, and use across its area of distribution. is called “five fingers herb” (or names containing the words “five,” “fingers,” “hand” or “foot”) in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Catalan, Basque, and Chinese, due to the leaf morphology. Consider the olive tree, which in the Mediterranean is both omnipresent and widely used yet is known simply as the “olive tree.” On the other hand, some plants’ names are quite similar in the different languages of the places where they grow, for example, Potentilla reptans L. Functionality, however, is no guarantee of name diversity. has a variety of names throughout Greece, which probably reflects the importance of the plant for local societies. The proliferation of names for individual botanical species is related to a variety of factors: the geographical range of the plant and languages spoken in its area, the ethnobotanical value as a ritual and/or medicinal plant, its strange appearance or resemblance to familiar objects, etc.). ![]() Some names refer unequivocally to a specific plant species (monosemic name), while other names can be used for different plants (polysemic names). Gledhill noted that “Common plant names present language at its richest and most imaginative.… Local variations in common names are numerous and this is perhaps a reflection of the importance of the plant in general conversation in the kitchen and in herbalism throughout the country in bygone days.” The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. ![]()
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