Definition of plantlike

(Helen Hooven Santmyer, "There Were Fences"...)

My great_grandmother , I have been told , made her garden her great pride ; she cherished rare and delicate plants like oleanders in tubs and wall-flowers and lemon verbenas in pots that had to be wintered in the cellar ; she filled the waste spots of the yard with common things like the garden_heliotrope in a corner by the woodshed , and the plantain_lilies along the west_side of the house .

(A.L. Kroeber, "Semantic Contribution of Lexicostatistic...)

The result is that I included 70 animal names , but Swadesh only 4 ; and somewhat similarly for plants , 16 as against 4 .

Swadesh , and therefore Hoijer , felt compelled to omit all terms denoting species or even genera ( fox , vulture , salmon , yellow_pine , manzanita ) ; their classes of animal and plant terms are restricted to generalizations or recurrent parts ( fish , bird , tree , grass , horn , tail , bark , root ) .

If adjectival meanings show relatively low retentiveness of stems , as I am confident will prove to be the case in most languages of the world , why should our basic lists include 15 per_cent of these unstable forms , but only 8 per_cent of animals and plants which replace much more slowly ?

Had Hoijer substituted for his 15 adjectival slots 15 good animal and plant items , his rate of stem replacement would have been lower and the age of Athabascan language separation smaller .