Friedrich Paul. Proto-Indo-European trees: the arboreal system of a prehistoric people

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. — 188 p. — ISBN: 9780226264806."In this first major study since 1905 of the arboreal system of the Proto-lndo-Europeans, Paul Friedrich offers an original and updated synthesis of the fields of botany, linguistics, and anthropology. As a result he is able to develop an advanced historical-comparative theory of a prehistoric ethnosemantic system. His hypotheses relate directly to contemporary research on primitive classification, semantic reconstruction, and ethnosemantics and ethnoscience in general. Friedrich tests two central hypotheses. His first is taxonomic - that the people of this prehistoric society differentiated at least eighteen major categories of trees by the use of about twenty-five tree names for a somewhat larger number of species. His second hypothesis is methodological -- that the rich scholarship on tree names in lndo-Europeanist philology and linguistics can be significantly related to the results of paleobotanical research to yield a more realistic inference of the Proto-lndo-European arboreal system."