229country will have impacted Solega villages to varying degrees. The lowland villages
would be the most heavily impacted—the Solega language is quickly disappearing
from these communities—followed by the highland communities, and fi nally the
interior villages, where the old ways of living are still largely intact. It is highly
likely that the loss of language correlates well with a decline in TEK, and this would
lead to an appearance of variability. These two factors might introduce a certain
amount of noise into my data, but a clear, unambiguous signal that indicates true
baseline variation can be detected in the different bird-name lexemes recorded from
different villages. Patterns of binominalisation of bird names with the —hakki ‘bird’
morpheme were also highly variable, and it seems unlikely that either of the two
external factors could have caused this.
8.2 Diachronic Ethnobiology
TEK is not a homogeneous body of knowledge; nor is it a static repository of infor-
mation passed unchanged from generation to generation. Individual observations of
new phenomena made by a few gradually become known to many, and modify a
community’s body of traditional knowledge. Some results of Chap. 4 are relevant
here—one could easily imagine a variant name of the Paradise Flycatcher from one
village supplanting that of a neighbouring village over time, or of a particular way
of classifying sunbirds , as imagined by one section of the Solega community, gain-
ing currency in the wider community. Chapter 5 contains a real example of a land-
scape term that appears to be undergoing semantic change—the meaning of the
word tho:pu , in the speech of younger Solega has converged with that of its Kannada
cognate (grove/orchard), and now refers to a small clump of trees growing in isola-
tion. In the speech of older Solega, however, tho:pu still has the original, related
sense of ‘trees growing close together’, and is used as a general label for the tree-
dominated high-altitude forests that the Solega traditionally live in. An unremark-
able semantic shift, accompanied by a shift in referent, can therefore lead to a radical
change, between generations, in how the forest is perceived.
TEK encoded in language can also preserve the memory of past phenomena for
future generations. The discussion on place name s in Chap. 3 shows how the names
of landscape features, old villages and even individual trees can preserve extremely
fi ne-grained information on the distribution on plant species, both historical and cur-
rent. In [ 8 ] as well as in Chap. 6 , I mention how the invasion of the Solega’s home
forests by the woody weed Lantana has led to massive and irreversible changes to
both the forest ecosystem, and to the Solega’s lifestyle. A signifi cant component of
Solega TEK now includes the ways in which native plants and animals have been
adversely affected by a loss of habitat and food sources. Foremost in this category is
the diffi culty that elephants now have in locating suffi cient food and water, or in even
travelling from one part of the forest to another. These frustrations have made these
animals irritable and dangerous, and the Solega now have to exercise additional care
while going about their daily activities. Many culturally signifi cant understorey
8.2 Diachronic Ethnobiology