Musa (genus)
Musa is one of two or three genera in the family Musaceae. The genus includes flowering plants producing edible bananas and plantains. Around 70 species of Musa are known, with a broad variety of uses. Though they grow as high as trees, banana and plantain plants are not woody and their apparent "stem" is made up of the bases of the huge leaf stalks. Thus, they are technically gigantic herbaceous plants. Musa species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species, including the giant leopard moth and other Hypercompe species, including H. albescens (only recorded on Musa), H. eridanus, and H. icasia.
Banana plants represent some of the largest herbaceous plants existing in the present, with some reaching up to 9 m (30 ft) in height or 18 m (59 ft) in the case of Musa ingens. The large herb is composed of a modified underground stem (rhizome), a false trunk of tightly rolled petioles, a network of roots, and a large flower spike. The false trunk is an aggregation of the basal portion of leaf sheathes; only when the plant is ready to flower does a true stem grow up through the sheath and droop back down towards.[2] At the end of this stem, a peduncle forms (with M. ingens having the second-longest peduncle known, exceeded only by Agave salmiana), bearing many female flowers protected by large purple-red bracts. The extension of the stem (the rachis) continues growth downward, where terminal male flowers grow. The leaves originate from a pseudostem and unroll to show a leaf blade with two lamina halves.[3] The lamina can be as much as 7 m (23 ft) long in the case of M. truncata of the Malay Peninsula).[4] Musa species reproduce by both sexual (seed) and asexual (suckers) processes, using asexual means when producing sterile (unseeded) fruits. Further qualities to distinguish Musa include spirally arranged leaves, fruits as berries, the presence of latex-producing cells, flowers with five connate tepals and one member of the inner whorl distinct, and a petiole with one row of air channels.[5]
The native distribution of the genus Musa includes most of the Indomalayan realm and parts of north-eastern Australasia. It has been introduced to many other parts of the world with tropical or subtropical climates.[6]
The genus Musa was first named by Carl Linnaeus in 1753.[7] The name is a Latinization of the Arabic name for the fruit, mauz (موز). Mauz meaning Musa is discussed in the 11th-century Arabic encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine, which was translated to Latin in medieval times and well known in Europe.[Note 1] Muz is also the Turkish, Persian, and Somali name for the fruit. Some sources assert that Musa is named for Antonius Musa, physician to the Emperor Augustus.[8]
According to linguist Mark Donohue and archaeologist Tim Denham, the ultimate origin of the Latinized form musa is in the Trans–New Guinea languages, where certain cultivars of bananas are known under a form *muku.[9] From there, the term was borrowed into the Austronesian languages of the area, and migrated across Asia, via the Dravidian languages of India, into Persian, Greek, and Arabic as a Wanderwort:[10][11]
As for the word banana, it came to English from Spanish and Portuguese, which had apparently obtained it from a West African language, possibly Wolof (Senegal).[12]
