•A study by Blakney
(1963) listed and grouped the vernacular terms across the continent. Blakney found that the two
principal word-stems #-ko and #-to were
widespread. Unfortunately, the data
that Blakney used failed to consistently distinguish between plantain and banana, and as he seems to have
been unaware of their very
different distributions, he failed to match any of his widespread roots with either type.
•Blakney concluded from
the broad dispersal of the root #-ko must
indicate that it formed part of the core vocabulary of the Niger-Congo language phylum. This is now an extremely problematic assumption.
•Other authors (e.g.
Vansina 1990) argued for an early date for the banana in the equatorial rainforest on the basis on linguistics, although without setting out the evidence
in detail.
•Rossel (1998) studied
the vernacular terminology of plantain and banana in the entire continent. Her studies
accumulate much fresh data, but
reach the rather idiosyncratic conclusion that ‘A westward
spread of musa (from Asia) began only in Islamic times and reached Africa not long afterwards’ (Rossel 1998:
52).