The paper presents the nomenclature for trees in Slovene, French and Latin. A historical perspective on Slovene begins with a lexicological analysis of 16th century texts, such as those occurring in the dictionary by Hieronym Megiser (1603) or in the free-flowing text of Dalmatin’s Bible and its registers. In this way we can gain an insight into the history of a language and its semantic development and shifts from general to specialised labelling. Slovene-French equivalent terms for trees offer an opportunity for formal-grammatical, word-formational, etymological and phraseological comparisons that relate also to the fruits of trees. In both languages the expression for the fruit appeared before the expression for the tree, while there are also instances of the expression for the fruit being used for the tree. The analogous semantic developments, and instances of overlapping and divergence, are of particular interest in two non-contact languages. This research
into historical terminology is part of the preparation for the production of entries for a dictionary of Slovene Protestant writers.
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