Deni Plant Names

This article is a report on Deni ethnobotanical terms and their indigenous speakers’ classification/taxonomy collected from two speakers in 1993 at Porto Velho, only Rondônia. The transcriptions are believed to be phonologically accurate, but the work reported on is the only work I have done on Deni, so occasional errors may be present.

Often, or even usually, my informants did not give me life-form names, but sub-life-form names, or categories from a cross-cutting or use-based, feature-based, or habitat-based classification.
My tentative line-up of Deni and "universal" categories is as follows: MAJOR LIFE FORMS TREES: has wood/madeira and bark/casca planted trees (all have fruit, even if not eaten): 7ede(ni) (bitter manioc called 7itshu, but sweet manioc called 7ede) wild trees with fruit, even if not eaten: 7ede(ni) wild trees with no fruit, even if wood not useful: 7ava big leafy trees with no fruit: 7ava 7aphani (1x) trees with flowers: 7ava karabuni (3x) wild trees used for their wood: 7ede(ni) if they have fruit, even if not eatable, 7ava if they don't wild trees used for their fruit: 7ede(ni) Some genetic groupings have some members labeled 7ede(ni) and others labeled 7ava.
Some trees are labelled both 7ava and 7ede(ni), depending on what informants are focusing on.
There are very many TREES; in the end, informants agreed on what they were, but seem to have no single unambiguous name for the category: thus the category is, as least pragmatically, covert. 7ava does not mean 'tree' as such, but since it means wood, and is not used for woody vines, it can in practice only be applied to TREES.
Manioc, as is generally the case in tropical America, is of problematic life-form. Metalinguistically, it is called a 'tree/pau, árvore', because it has bark, but its fruit is a tuber, like that of the sweet potato, which is a VINE, and manioc also lacks real wood. The term 7itshu 'stalk', used for bitter manioc, is otherwise never used for TREES. The term 7ede, used for sweet manioc, can be used for plants of all life-form classes. I follow the metalinguistic terminology instead of omitting manioc from TREES altogether, and instead calling it a minor life form, which is nevertheless a reasonable alternative.

VINES
Cultivated vines: madu and/or 7itshu(ni) [two were called both 7itshu(ni) and namiza, and one group was called both 7edeni and bununi.
The term madu can only apply to VINES, and most VINES are called madu. This life-form seems clearly named.
HERBS: Many obvious grasses are lumped in this category, though there seems to be a separate category of cultivated grasses, with four members in three groups. The defining characteristic of this category (even including cultivated grasses) seems to be 'leafy plant with neither wood nor bark'. The term most frequently applied to HERBS is 7ephe/7aphani (23x). The term 7ede(ni) refers to a fruit, as does bunu(ni). The term 7itshu(ni) probably refers to a non-woody stalk.
There is no category GRASSES.

PALMS:
Most PALMS have fruits, even if not eatable: acordingly all PALMS are called 7ede(ni); a few are also called bunu. In local Portuguese PALMS are called palha or coqueiro. Informants have no problem applying these terms to separate off PALMS from TREES; but there (apparently) is no Deniinternal way of doing this. Some PALMS really do have wood (apparently), but they lack bark. If PALMS were considered to be a subgroup within TREES, it would be the largest grouping under TREES. Accordingly, I consider this to be an unnamed life form.
To summarize, we tentatively seem to have major life-form categories 7ava 'wood (y plant)' = TREE, 7ephe/7aphani 'leaf (y plant)' = HERB, and madu 'vine', but these terms, at least for my informants, are overshadowed in saliency by 7ede(ni) 'fruit', bunu(ni) 'fruit', 7itshu(ni) 'stalk', and karabuni 'flower', whenever these are features of the plant as well. PALM is unnamed. All minor life forms lack a life-form name. Those that have some kind of noticeable fruit may be called 7ede(ni) (or bunu(ni)), and one reed-like plant is called 7aphani, which befits the fact that reeds are really grasses. It is, however, unclear/untested whether reeds should be included under HERBS. NOTE: the 'pseudo-life-form' names given by the informants are NOT reproduced in these materials. Unclear: some morphemes have underlying stress on a particular vowel, once per morpheme; others have no underlying stress; stress on every other syllable when not underlying but details unclear; stress is written once per word, where present in notes. The two informants often did not (seem to) agree about the position of stress; in these cases, stress is probably not underlying. All this data needs to be checked for stress.

/b d/ imploded.
/v/ bilabial. /p t k/ are strongly articulated and occasionally seem aspirated when they are not.
/ts/ and /tsh/ are hard to distinguish; /tsh/ is much more frequent. /r/ is [l] sometimes; conditions not yet worked out. PHONOTACTICS VV clusters permitted when vowels different and one or both of the vowels is high.
/7/ contrastive word medially, and when word initial is copied under reduplication.

Note
All Deni nouns are either masculine (m) or feminine (f) in gender.
No plant specimens were collected.
Scientific names are based on names provided in picture books examined by informants. The (lack of) reliability of such a procedure means that these identifications must be taken with a grain of salt.
Note: during the same field season where I collected Deni plants names, I also collected plant names from a speaker of Paitér, which I was told had the name Suruí; therefor, e when I know the Paitér equivalent, I annotate the Deni name with Sur. abc.  GROUPNAME tshu*bu f Rem. baskets; wild; grows as tall as a man; similar to kakiba