142
children , that the owner’s new dog had ruined a lot of the furniture, or that the
kitchen was currently being renovated. The fourth way in which this chapter
differs from the New York study is therefore the fact that the primary data tend
more towards the ‘elicited’ end of the spontaneity spectrum, than towards the
‘naturalistic’. I do not see this as a problem because, as mentioned earlier, I am
equally interested in the encyclopaedic knowledge of the Solega, as I am in their
means of communicating about landscapes.
5.2 Ka:ḍu as a Landscape
In addition to these terms that largely denote the non-living (geological and hydro-
logical) environment, Solega also has a range of compounds that incorporate the word
ka:ḍu , which is glossed in Table 5.2 as ‘forest’. It was hinted in Chap. 3 that the gloss
‘forest’ is far too simplistic for this versatile word, as the compounds formed with
ka:ḍu include labels not just for forests, but also for boulder fi eld s , grasslands and
fallow land. However, as the descriptions of these forest types (given below) illus-
trate, the topographic features of the landscape largely determine where they tend to
occur. Many of the geological/topographical landscape terms shown in Table 5.2
form lexical compounds with ka:ḍu to generate an additional set of landscape terms
that have highly variable characteristics. This topic was fi rst investigated during the
fi rst few weeks of my fi eldwork in the B. R. Hills. A group of young Solega men
(their names have been abbreviated to JS, NG, JV in the following transcripts) were
asked to fi rst provide a list of terms used to describe the forest and different parts of
the landscape. When a list of words was obtained, the men were asked to give any
information they could, on the plant and animal life in these landscape types, along
with any salient information that might help an outsider understand the meaning of
these words. These Solega were reluctant to speak to me in their native language at
this stage, preferring instead to use Kannada as the means of communication (their
stated reason for preferring Kannada was that their Solega was not ‘good enough’).
In a later session, the same information was asked of an elderly Solega man (BG),
who was by then quite familiar with my work, and was willing to speak on any topic
in fl uent Solega. At this interview, a younger Solega man (MRM) acted as interpreter
and interviewer—I would ask him questions in Kannada , and he would, in turn, relay
those queries to the main consultant (the elderly man) in conversational Solega. During
such interviews, it was not uncommon for the younger man to be addressed directly by
the consultant more often than I was (as determined by the direction of the latter’s
gaze, for instance). While I thus had less control over the direction of the interview, the
advantage of this technique was that BG’s speech was far more naturalistic; I could
also be certain that the information being provided really did lie within the domain of
Solega traditional knowledge. The interviewer was, after all, a Solega, who would
have alerted me to the presence of any inconsistencies in the older man’s speech.
The descriptions below are the result of combining the information from both
elicitation sessions. In general, the data from both sessions were largely consistent,
5 Landscape Terms in Solega