[Nhcoll-l] Common names

[Callomon,Paul]

Cultures that do not primarily use the alphabet in everyday life, such as China, Japan, Thailand, India and many others, usually have vernacular taxonomies that far predate the Linnean system. Adopting Western rules in science was part of the Victorian process of becoming "modern" nation states, but at local level the older words and meanings live on. In some cases they reflect a more detailed knowledge of the ecology and morphology of organisms than that shared in the "scientific" literature, but they fail as a means of reliably defining entities as they are usually too local and situational to be reproducible.

A fascinating 1954 paper related how one researcher took a picture of one of Japan's most common spiders (the Jigumo, or Ground Spider, familiar to Kabuki fans) and showed it to folks in villages from one end of the land to the other, asking "What's this?" He tallied exactly 100 discrete vernacular names for the same organism.
I showed Nagao's later map of the names (and talked about vernacular names in some depth) in this work:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363690920_The_Nature_of_Names_Japanese_vernacular_nomenclature_in_natural_science



Paul Callomon
Collection Manager, Malacology and General Invertebrates
________________________________
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia PA 19103-1195, USA
prc44 at drexel.edu<mailto:prc44 at drexel.edu> Tel 215-405-5096 - Fax 215-299-1170




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