73the noun phrase is not a landscape feature, the referent of the toponym can be both a
real-world object, as well as a place, as in ne:ri haṭṭi ‘ Syzygium cumini shed’. This is
also particularly true of the names of individual trees (see ‘The naming of individual
trees’ below), such as huli ha:rida honne ‘ tiger jumped Pterocarpus.marsupium ’.
Roughly a fi fth of place name s is tripartite (X–Y–Z). In some such cases, Y and
Z are both landscape terms, while in others, the Y position is occupied by a verb,
and the toponym comes to signify an action or event.
te:k-arre abbi ‘teak rock.platform waterfall’
katte satta pa:la ‘donkey died ford’
guṇḍu sikkida habbi ‘bullet found waterfall’
3.7.1 Sources of Current Plant Distributions
Around 230 Solega place name s have been recorded from the B. R. Hills , and of
these, roughly one-third contains the name of a plant (Table 3.2 ). As described in
[ 166 ], Solega toponyms that contain a plant name provide a record of an individual
large tree or single-species group of trees. That these trees really do exist in such
named locations can be readily verifi ed, except in the case of trees that have died
(see the following section for more details). Such traditional knowledge of the loca-
tions of individual tree specimens complements the Solega’s otherwise very precise
knowledge of the distributions of individual tree species. Practically all adult Solega
can very accurately identify the forest types where any given tree species may be
found.
The Solega language has numerous terms for forest or vegetation types that are
distinguished by various features, such as altitude, topography , species composition
and geology. These are described in more detail in Chap. 5. On being asked to
describe a particular forest type, a Solega person will often provide a detailed list of
the trees that typically occur in such a habitat. Such lists can provide a rough but
accurate idea of not only the species composition of a particular location, but also
the small-scale geographic distribution of a particular plant species. In the follow-
ing extract, the speaker lists the tree species occurring inside the ka:nu ka:ḍu ‘ ever-
green forest ’ (many of these trees have yet to be identifi ed scientifi cally):
(BG) Ka:ninalli ha:le mara ade, thuruve mara ade, kakkilu, bikkilu, bella:ḍe,
ku:ma:ũ, kende, soravilu, aravilu, hebbe:vu... aravilu kende maradalli
je:na:de.
(In the ka:nu , there’s the ha:le tree, the thuruve tree, etc....there are
bees/ honey on the aravilu and kende trees.)
(MRM) Nalavattu aivattu je: nu baratte onde maradalli.
(Forty or fi fty colonies come to a single tree.)
(BG) Ne:ri, ne:ri mara,a:ga matte, i: ta:ri mara ondu ille. A ka:nu oḷage e:va
ja:ga:dalli ue ta:ri mara huṭṭa:dille. A:mele, koḷamada mara, mi:nada
mara...
3.7 Plants in Place Names