Healing Plants from Alor Island: A Data Paper for Language Documentation

This paper provides the readers with a comprehensive and systematized dataset containing names of healing plants and common plants with medicinal properties from the Abui context in Alor Island, Alor-Pantar Archipelago, Timor area, Southeast Indonesia. Abui is an endangered Papuan language spoken in the central sector of Alor (the name of the language is also the ethnonym of the local population). Our dataset includes the phytonyms in Abui, their scientific names, their English translations, the medicinal properties (actual or as perceived by the natives) of the related plants, and some synthetic notes on their usages and cultural significance among the local indigenous people. The dataset is relevant in that it collects not only a list of terms from a specialized lexicon of an endangered language, but also provides the readers with details on local traditional healing practices, medical properties, and cultural aspects for further analysis. Our operation of data collection and sharing is aimed at ideally associating methods and practices in Language Documentation with Ethno-Botany, History of Culture, History of Traditional Medicine, and Pharmacology. The paper aims also at being an encouragement to scholars working on these disciplines to broaden the horizons of studies in which Language Documentation and Medicine work together for the discovery of new solutions for human healthcare.