Diane - did you ever come up with a possible identification for this plant? You may have mentioned before but I forgot.
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About the linguistic side of things: if the single word between the trunk and the rightmost root is the label, it starts with the K-gallow, which, in my analyses of the small plant labels corresponds to consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth: k or g (and rarely the fricative "x"). The second letter is definitely a vowel, often corresponds to "a".
Now there is one group of languages where the word for elephant starts with "ga". Interestingly, the "ga"-elephant word overlaps well with the range of these plants. The word for elephant is gaja or gajah in many Indian languages, Indonesia, Malaysia, Java... This opens up the possibility that the whole label does indeed read something like "elephant leaf" or "elephant plant" in the local language.
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About the linguistic side of things: if the single word between the trunk and the rightmost root is the label, it starts with the K-gallow, which, in my analyses of the small plant labels corresponds to consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth: k or g (and rarely the fricative "x"). The second letter is definitely a vowel, often corresponds to "a".
Now there is one group of languages where the word for elephant starts with "ga". Interestingly, the "ga"-elephant word overlaps well with the range of these plants. The word for elephant is gaja or gajah in many Indian languages, Indonesia, Malaysia, Java... This opens up the possibility that the whole label does indeed read something like "elephant leaf" or "elephant plant" in the local language.