Phytonymic Derivational Systems in the Romance Languages

This study, an admirable addition to the school of suffixal-derivation headed by Yakov Malkiel, explores the diachronic linguistic processes of the nomenclature used for plants from the flourishing of Classical Latin to contemporary Romance languages, with a special focus on Hispano-Romance.

Walter Geiger’s exhaustively researched volume takes a diverse phytonymic lexicon (including trees, fruits, vegetables, flowers, grasses, grains, and plant parts) from its process of derivation in Latin through the nominalization of adjectival systems and semantic classifications to demonstrate the trends of retention, functional diversification, and extinction of derivational patterns through language development.