51plant’ or so: giḍa. I eventually realised that so: was the English loan word ‘show’.
My guide’s intention was to inform me that such plants, that had been brought from
the city, were only ‘for show’, and were otherwise quite useless.
For countless amateur (and professional) Western naturalists, the collection and
identifi cation of butterfl ies and moths has been a staple preoccupation—perhaps
even an obsession—for well over two centuries. As a result, vernacular English
names abound for the many thousands of lepidopteran species discovered around
the world to date. The many butterfl ies that can be found in the Solega forest, how-
ever, live out their lives in complete anonymity, kept company only by their name-
less host orchids and ferns. All butterfl ies and moths are simply called siṭṭe in
Solega, despite the considerable morphological diversity present in this group
(Fig. 2.4a–m ). Insects of all shapes, sizes and colours can be seen fl apping around
understory plants in the spring months, ranging from dull brown moths to gaudy,
metallic butterfl ies with wing spans equivalent to those of small birds (many of
which, incidentally, are also called siṭṭe ). These insects appear in large numbers
every year, but as the Solega have no use for them, the taxon siṭṭe contains no sub-
ordinate terms. Even the highly distinctive Macroglossum stellaratum , which is so
unusual for a lepidopteran that it has been given the English name Hummingbird
Hawkmoth, is left out of the Solega lexicon, my respondents saying only that it was
ondu tarada huḷa ‘a kind of bug’ (Fig. 2.4n ). Solega has no name for even large soli-
tary bees and wasps that are of no practical use (Fig. 2.4o ) but at least four kinds of
je: nu ‘honeybee’, which are colonial and yield different kinds of honey , are named
(Fig. 2.5 ). Interestingly, a nearly identical situation has been reported by Hunn [ 62 ],
for the North American language Sahaptin.
Fig. 2.3 Two morphologically very different types of fern that grow on a rocky substrate are both
called arre aṇṇe ‘rock fern’. Photos by the author
2.6 Folk Genera, Rank and Nomenclature