The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega A Linguistic Perspective

98

collecting data for her research on bird behaviour and ecology. All fi eld assistants
lived in po:ḍu or villages in the vicinity of the fi eld station and the Biligiri
Rangaswamy Temple, which is frequented on a regular basis by largely Kannada -
speaking tourists and devotees from the lowlands. As some of the bird names col-
lected at this stage were bare mononomials , while some were binomials (of the form
x-hakki , where hakki means ‘bird’), the Solega fi eld assistants were also asked to
judge the acceptability of adding or removing the hakki morpheme, both when the
name was used in isolation, or when it was embedded in a sentence, such as a:
marada me:le ondu x/x-hakki ku:tide ‘there is a x/x-bird sitting on that tree’. On the
basis of these initial responses, the bird names were divided into three categories,
namely ‘obligate binomials’, where the –hakki cannot be omitted, ‘optional

Yerekatte (779)

ATREE Field station (1198)

Keredimba (1196)

Nellikadiru (1358)

Maarigudi (1256)

Monakai (1259)

N

6 0 6 12 Kilometers

Karnataka

INDIA

Fig. 4.1 Map of the BRT, showing location and elevation (in metres) of the fi eld station and fi ve
settlements visited for the picture elicitation task. Previously published in [ 167 ]

4 Solega Ethno-ornithology