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made by the examples given below are quite obvious. Thus, hoṭṭeno:vina ambu
‘stomach-ache vine’ is a plant whose root is used to treat stomach ache, while mu:r
ele na:gada giḍa ‘three-leaf na:ga plant’ large, trifoliate leaves. The wild passion
fruit ka:ge ma:ri ambu ‘crow chick vine’ is so named because of the appearance of
its edible, ripe fruit, while the small, weedy Tridax procumbens is called o:le ‘ear-
ring’ in at least one Solega settlement ( Bu:ta:ni po:ḍu ) because the children there
use the long fl ower stalks to make earrings. This plant also has the alternative names
of garugada giḍa or ḍa:bu giḍa in other settlements.
Descriptive Names:
ha:lu so:rada geḍḍe ‘milk releasing root’
hoṭṭeno:vina ambu ‘stomach ache vine’
ko:ḷi kuṭumana giḍa ‘cockscomb plant’ Gloriosa superba
ka:ge ma:ri ambu ‘crow chick vine’ Passifl ora edulis
o:le giḍa ‘earring plant’ Tridax procumbens
mu:r ele na:gada giḍa ‘three leaf na:ga plant’
The patterns seen in the naming of plants can also be observed to a large extent
in the bird name s discussed in Chap. 4. Unlike the bird names, however, where the
superordinate category label hakki ‘bird’ can often be omitted, the same cannot be
said for plant name s , except in a small number of linguistic contexts. These contexts
are described below in Sect. 3.6. In the next Section, the issue of correspondences
between Solega plant names and the scientifi c classifi cation of plants is taken up.
3.5 Solega Ethnospecies and Scientifi c Classifi cation
For the vast majority of plants, there is a one-to-one correspondence between a
Solega ethnospecies and a botanical species. This applies to all three categories of
names described in the previous section. In a handful of cases, one ethnospecies label
can refer to a large number of scientifi c species; this is particularly true of plants that
Solega people regard as having no utility to either themselves or to other animals.
Included here are categories such as baccaṇike ‘ orchids ’, sa:yã ‘ ferns ’, pa:se ‘lichen/
moss’ and aṇṇe ‘succulents like Bryophyllum spp.’ Naturally, these are open-ended
categories, whose exact membership is of no relevance to Solega speakers.
In a very small number of cases, more than one ethnospecies maps onto a single
biological species. For instance, biḷi sampage and kenda sampage label the white and
orange varieties of the sacred Michelia champaca tree respectively, while ma:vũ and
tore ma:vũ are the Solega names for the cultivated and wild varieties of the mango
Mangifera indica respectively. While the one-to-many and many-to-one patterns are
commonly found in ethnoclassifi cation systems all over the world, the more interest-
ing issues in Solega ethnotaxonomy lie in the relationships between Solega catego-
ries and biological genera. These relationships are discussed next, in the context of
Berlin ’s [ 9 ] claims regarding the saliency of ‘folk generics ’ and scientifi c genera.
3 Plants in Solega Language and Culture