234
Moreover, if covert categories of organisms that can be formed on the basis of
morphological similarities are a cross-linguistic universal, then why restrict the
scope of this universal to the top of the hierarchy? Why shouldn’t languages which
lack specifi c level taxa be re-analysed as possessing generic taxa containing endless
numbers of covert specifi cs? Here I refer primarily to the languages of hunter-
gatherer s , who, according to Berlin , are unable to notice the fi ner distinctions
between subgeneric groupings (Chap. 7 ) that agriculturalists have grown accus-
tomed to. I am also reminded of the fact that Solega has no subgeneric lexemes for
the large numbers of fern and orchid species that grow in their forests, species that
appear distinctive even to casual observers with no biological expertise. The Solega
certainly know that there are many kinds of ferns and orchids —are we to gloss these
as covert species, because the results of a sorting task would unequivocally yield
groupings based on biological species? My answer would be an emphatic ‘No!’
because the lack of subgeneric labels in this case is the result of a lack of a utilitarian
relationship between the Solega and these taxa. The Solega have no use for orchids
or ferns, and have therefore not bothered to give them any distinctive names.
8.5 Linguistic Context and Encyclopaedic Knowledge
The notion of ‘ context ’ has been shown to play a crucial role in nomenclature and
taxonomy (Chap. 4 ), as well as in the use of landscape terms in naturalistic speech
(Chap. 5 ). In the naming of birds, Solega speakers frequently provided unanalysable
mononomial lexemes in elicitation sessions, but subsequent utterances reveal that
many such names could in fact be paired with —hakki ‘bird’ to produce a more com-
plete, binomial label, that may be more representative of the way people refer to
these birds in naturalistic speech. Further complicating the picture is the fact that (a)
birds can have optional binomial, obligate binomial and obligate mononomial labels
depending on the species, (b) people from different villages can have markedly dif-
ferent ideas about which birds belong to which nomenclatural category, and (c)
other groups of living organisms (when grouped along the lines of Berlin ’s ‘ life
form s ’) have very different naming patterns from that of the birds. Clearly, naming
conventions can vary not only among the separate sub-populations of the Solega
speech community, but also with the nature of the referent being named. Both these
fi ndings strongly suggest that the nomenclature of living organisms in Solega is a
highly variable exercise, and that in the face of such data, it makes little sense to talk
about a unifi ed Solega ethno-taxonomy of birds (or any other taxon), let alone the
existence of cross-linguistic universals of classifi cation and nomenclature that are
largely unaffected by culture or context.
The Solega landscape terms pattern differently with context —surprisingly, natu-
ralistic speech contains very few references to any forest/landscape type other than
the very general terms ka:ḍu and na:ḍu. These terms serve the very important pur-
pose of contrasting between human habitation and the wilderness in the case of the
former, and between Solega and non-Solega territories in the case of the latter. The
8 Conclusions