The flora of Malaya has fascinated many people, including some of the world's greatest naturalists. The colonial botanists/ foresters' attitudes toward vernacular names of our forest-related resources were originally positive, and words such as belukar, lopak, utan and countless native plant names were used alongside the scientific (or international to borrow E.J.H Corner's term) names. It is difficult to find the exact date when the hindi-derived 'jungle' became disused, and the french-derived term 'forest' became more 'correct' but one person, Corner, did retain the use of 'jungle' in his third edition of the Wayside trees of Malaya, published in 1988.
Back then 'ethno-botany' was not even a recognised (or created) research field, but the early colonial botanists/foresters were doing it! Someone recently suggested that an ethno-botanist is a non-native person studying a locality's flora--so by his definition I am not an ethno-botanist when I study the plants in my kampung even though I'm employing the techniques of 'ethnobotany' or 'western scientific botany'.
Sometime during the previous century it became unfashionable to use vernacular names of plants when studying or classifying them! This happened (and still does) in the scientific fields of plant ecology and botany. The rationale for this seemingly 'reverse-xenophobic' decision is that local people classify plants differently from ecologists/botanists--the former may focus more on the uses of plants, therefore those plants that have uses are given specific names, sometimes more than one name per plant. For instance, the enau palm; its sap, which can be made into sugar or toddy, is known as nigho anau, whereas its fruits are called buah belulok in the villages of Negeri Sembilan. The plants that do not have local uses are, otherwise, lumped into a 'category' of lifeforms, such as aka or ghumput.
The ecologists/botanists, on the other hand, divide plants based on their physical appearance--the shape of fruits, flowers, the many parts of fruits and flowers, the shapes of leaves...and so each plant is named accordingly, although some stupid/sychophantic/self-important individuals have chosen to name plants after some humans. These names are given in latin, the language of the learned europe once upon a time but is now effectively restricted to the Vatican and the field of organismal systematics!
Actually the villagers of Negeri Sembilan (and in other places) do use 'appearance' as a basis of naming. For example, pokok buah kotolir kambing, is a name given to a tree that has fruits resembling the penis of a goat! In a sense, these local people are more in tune with their plants than the foreign botanists/ecologists ........
And guess what the folks in Negeri Sembilan call the cute-looking passiflora.....
