African elements in Saramaccan Maroon plant names in Suriname
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ancestors of the Saramaccan Maroons, who were brought as enslaved Africans to Suriname, used their ethnobotanical knowledge and native languages to name the flora in their new environment. Little is known about the influence of African languages on Saramaccan plant naming. We hypothesized that Saramaccan plant names were more influenced by Central African languages than found so far based on ethnobotanical research, mainly because data on the Central African region was scarce. We compiled a new database on Saramaccan plant names and compared these names with an unpublished plant name database from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the earlier published NATRAPLAND database on Afro–Surinamese plant names to find comparable plant names for botanically related species in Africa. We further analyzed form, meaning, function, and categories of Saramaccan plant name components by means of dictionaries and grammars. In total, 39% of the Saramaccan plant names had an African origin, of which 44% were African retentions, 54% were innovations, and 2% were misidentifications with botanical links to Africa via other plant species. Most retentions were of Central African origin (62%). The Bantu language that contributed most to Saramaccan plant names was Kikongo, followed by West African Kwa languages. Plant names reveal important information on the African origin of the Saramaccans and deserve more scientific attention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".