How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia?

Abstract

Abstract The process of moving from collecting plants in the wild to cultivating and gradually domesticating them has as its linguistic corollary the formation of a specific vocabulary to designate the plants and their parts, the fields in which they are cultivated, the tools and activities required to cultivate them and the food preparations in which they enter. From this point of view, independent domestications of a plant can be expected to result in wholly independent vocabularies. Conversely, when cultivation of a plant spreads from one population to another, one expects elements of the original vocabulary to spread with cultivation practices. This paper examines the vocabularies of rice in Asian languages for evidence of linguistic transfers, concluding that there are at least two independent vocabularies of rice in Asia. This suggests at least two independent starts of cultivation and domestications of Asian rice.