Etnobiologia e mondo antico: una prospettiva di ricerca

Text of a conference held at Ferrara University (May 2006) on ethnobiology and its possible application to classical studies. After a brief introduction to the field, the author focuses on the difference between primary and secondary folkbiological names, stressing the properties of descriptiveness and transparency typical of the latter. Secondary folkbiological terms are further analyzed into four typologies, by way of linguistic patterns drawn from generative morphology. This provides a basis for describing the application of the given analytical model to a corpus of ethnobiological data collected from written sources, as it is the case with the cultures involved here. Some examples from ancient Greek and Latin folkbiology clarify these and further issues (e. g. those connected with tracing taxonomical features selected as distinctive of a given biological referent).