noblehunter wrote:Good points. Makes a nice bit of theology, too; the modified names representing something further from God's plan than the standalone. If the nomenclature is consistently different between life for consecrated ground versus life for unconsecrated ground, a linguistically-inclined theologian could have a solid monograph on which words indicate a closeness to God and which indicate a distance.
Or I'm reading too much into a convenience adopted by the author to say, "this is like a pine tree but not".
Chances are Shan-wei's terraforming crews started naming Safehold species well ahead of Langhorne and Bedard's people and without any interest in helping along a plan of banishing all knowledge of Earth which came as a later surprise to them. So you'd have near-this and pseudo-that, whether or not the this or that were included among the species introduced in terraformed areas.
Then Langhorne and Bedard and all had to try to sanitize the language being introduced to colonists in the Writ and in conversation from angels out working with colonists - or just let the language have near-this and pseudo-that without the this or that being around. At some point, leaving a few oddities like that or explaining them another way ("The crocus was one of Langhorne's treasured flowers and especially beloved by God, til the fallen archangel Grimaldi destroyed them all in petty spite...") may have been less troublesome than trying to purge all references to them.
So what amounts to an authorial convenience can get written under one rug or another.