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that appear to be indigenous. Like much of Solega traditional knowledge, the exact
sequence of events in the calendar is open to a considerable amount of interpretation
and discussion. One possible reason is that the calendar has long since fallen into
disuse, with the result that many speakers (including older speakers) cannot now
remember the full sequence of lexemes. Indeed, different people provide what seem
to be different selections of lexemes from the complete list, although the ordering of
lexemes tends to be consistent between speakers. People also say that the last rain
in December is also the last rain of the season. This, I suspect, is not a reference to
the end of the Gregorian calendar, but rather to the fact that no further rain is
expected to fall during the following 3 months.
Fig. 6.1 The Kannada calendar of rains, beginning with ashvini and ending with re:vati , along
with important festivals of the Kannada calendar
6 Signs and Relationships