L'oleandro nell'ambiente mediterraneo, tra vicende linguistiche e culturali

As a matter of fact, the botanical lexicon is a very interesting and productive field of study within the linguistic research, as the possibility of dealing with the ancient substrate of a language can be quite high. In the present article, the story of a word, that is the name of a typical Mediterranean plant, the oleander, is investigated, focusing on its different denominations, in some ancient and modern languages. The starting point is ancient Greek, where it seems that three different names existed. Each one of these names, ῥοδοδάφνη, ῥοδόδενδρον and νήριον, attested in Dioscorides and mentioned by Pliny the Elder, allows the identification of specific morphological and semantic elements, which can be found in other languages of the Indo-mediterranean region. Furthermore, the support of some literary evidences properly contributes to validate the general hypothesis. Specifically, this case study aims to show that when we talk about names of objects that refer mainly to the cultural background of a community of speakers, finding linguistic evidences is something that should be done reconstructing at the same time the cultural scenario that can justify the language itself. Following this path, lucky correspondences can be found sometimes, like in the case of the oleander tree.