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3.6 Ethnospecies Names and Linguistic Conventions
While it is a useful and interesting exercise to analyse the elements of an ethnoclas-
sifi cation scheme in an abstract, decontextualized manner (as has been done above),
it is important to complement such an analysis with some indication of how plant
and animal names are actually used by the speakers of a language in naturalistic,
everyday communicative events. Examining the use of a word within the context of
a narrative or a conversation—even a word as seemingly straightforward as a plant
name —can yield a much richer and more precise picture of the semantic range of
such a word, and reveal potentially hidden semantic connections with other con-
cepts and categories. The idea of fi rmly situating linguistic ethnobiological research
within a social and cultural context is a central theme of this book, and the following
paragraphs examine the use of ethnotaxonomic labels by Solega people in the con-
text of naturalistic speech.
Chapter 6 describes how numerous trophic, ecological or temporal relationships
between two or more biological entities, or between a biological entity and an abi-
otic feature of the environment can be encoded in Solega words. Plant name s appear
in compounds such as beṇḍe hu:vina visa ‘ Kydia calycina fl ower poison’ (a millet
disease that coincides with the fl owering of the beṇḍe tree) and baise hu:vina jiḍi
‘ baise fl ower drizzle’ (light rain that falls in December) and maruḷi je: nu ‘ Indigofera
sp. honey ’ (a particularly delicious type of honey made from ground-dwelling
bees)—these are clear indications of the fl owering of plants being used to mark
important environmental events and phenomena.
The form of a plant or animal name can be modifi ed depending on the type of
utterance in which it is used. While the full, ‘citation form’ of a plant name invari-
ably contains a superordinate label such as mara ‘tree’, this label can be optionally
Fig. 3.1 Percentages of non-matching, partially matching and fully matching plant groupings
(Solega ethnotaxa and Linnaean polytypic genera ) from Table 3.1
3 Plants in Solega Language and Culture