The question of universals in ethnobiological nomenclature

Abstract The classification and naming of plants and animals is said to follow a number of “universal” constraints cross-linguistically. While these constraints are generally accepted in the literature, few have been rigorously tested with a large language sample. In particular, the languages of mainland southeast Asia appear to have been neglected in such endeavours, even though it is common knowledge that some key constraints are violated in this region. Here, we investigate the construction of “Generic” plant and animal names in 22 languages of mainland southeast Asia, and show that the vast majority of these — especially among plant and fish ethnotaxa — are two-part “secondary names”, in contrast to a major constraint that predicts that such names should be one-part “primary names”. This appears to be a widespread areal feature, and has implications for the validity of other nomenclatural “universals”, which remain to be similarly tested.