Original Articles

On the generic nature of common Northern Sotho bird names: a probe into the cognitive systematization of indigenous knowledge

Published in: South African Journal of African Languages
Volume 24 , issue 2 , 2004 , pages: 95–117

DOI: 10.1080/02572117.2004.10587228

Author(s): LJ Louwrens Department of African Languages, South Africa

Abstract

A major claim made here is that, in the categorization of plants and animals by peoples living in traditional societies, there exists a specifiable and partially predictable set of plant and animal taxa that represents the smallest fundamental biological discontinuities easily recognized in any particular habitat. This large but finite set of taxa is special in each system in that its members stand out as beacons on the landscape of biological reality, figuratively crying out to be named. These groupings are the generic taxa of all such systems of ethnobiological classification, and their names are precisely the names of common speech (Berlin, 1992:53).

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