Page:A dictionary of the plant names of the Philippine Islands (1903).djvu/15

7 never any serious attempt made to carefully compile the various native plant names, and therefore the present list, though drawn from many sources, is comparatively incomplete. By far the greater number of names in the present enumeration are those of the Tagalog language, while of many of the dialects spoken in the Archipelago not a single plant name has ever been recorded.

It is probable that the people of the mountain tribes, the Negritos, the Igorrotes, the Mangyanes, etc., employ even a greater variety of names in specifying the various species of plants than do the more civilized tribes of the lands at lower elevations, but little or no attention has ever been given to the names used by these peoples. The limitations of the present enumeration can best be realized from the fact that most of the names here recorded are from perhaps 12 or 15 of the 70 or 80 dialects spoken by the various peoples of the Archipelago. With the great variation of the names in the same dialect, and the great number of dialects spoken in the Archipelago, the task of compiling a complete or nearly complete dictionary of the native plant names of the Archipelago is an unending one, and one that could be completed only with great difficulty even if the subject were of sufficient importance to warrant it.

Previously but two attempts have been made to compile any extensive lists of the plant names used by the natives of the Archipelago. The first was Vigil's "Diccionario," a pamphlet of 50 pages published in the year 1879, which enumerates about 2,400 names, the identifications being largely based on Blanco's "Flora de Filipinas." The second list is that given by Vidal in Appendix II to his "Sinopsis," where he enumerates about 1,800 names of tree species, giving the generic identifications only. Blanco, in his index to the native names given in his "Flora," gives but a small per cent of the total number enumerated in his text, while F.-Villar gives no index to the native names in his "Novissima Appendix."

The words "puti" or "maputi" (white) and "pula" or "mapula" (red) are frequently used in combination with other words to designate certain species, as are also the words "lalaqui" (man), "babaye" (woman), "dagat" (ocean), "itim" (black), "usá" (deer), "áso" (dog), "bundoc" or "gubat" (forest), and other words. The prefix "mala" is used in the sense that we use the word "false" — "malaacle" is "false acle," "malabanaba" is "false