Format: ORAL

Raivo Kalle1, Andres Kohv2, Renata Sukand3

1 Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia 2 Räpina School of Horticulture, Räpina, Estonia 3 Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

In modern society, knowledge about plants can originate from the family, from official sources or many hybrid forms in between (coming from media). The history of the scholarly botanical terminology in Estonia dates back to 1881, when the first botany schoolbook in Estonian was published. The next botany book, intended for a wide readership, was published in 1922 and contained greatly different content and terminology. Changing technical terms over time is only part of the problem. Looking at the present day botanical literature in Estonian, we see that the vocabulary used in current botanical literature has become increasingly specialized, understandable just to the specialists in the field. For ordinary citizens, such terms often remain distant and ambiguous. We conducted a qualitative survey on the Google Forms platform, answered by 149 people living in Tartu. We asked to free list up to 10 trees/shrubs, herbaceous plants and cultivated plants that they consider important. As additional qualitative questions, we asked why these plants are important to them and how the respondents would describe these plants. Only a few plants were described. Moreover, comparing the description of the most popular tree (birch) with the official key book gave a noticeable difference. We can clearly see that as the terminology of botanical literature diverges greatly from the local plant-related terminology, people may have less interest in those books. Neither do they need to describe different plants to each other in their everyday life, which leads to a loss of local botanical vocabulary in Estonian. We propose to name this phenomenon linguistic plant blindness and invite colleagues to discuss whether plant key books should consider using local plant-related vocabulary in parallel with the scientific one and include local plant uses to promote the interest in plants and through that reduce linguistic plant blindness.