ABSTRACT
This means that 'at that spot, the land comes back (ends) and there remains the sea'. But this distinction is only distantly connected with gardening, so we cannot dwell on it.
2. Another important opposition of a general character is that between valu, 'village', 'place of human habitation', and odila, which is used for 'space outside habitation', 'land covered with vegetation', 'bush', 'jungle'. But the word valu, on the one hand, is used in a more general sense for 'place' , 'spot'; and odila, on the other, in the narrower sense of 'the low, periodically cut vegetation which grows on cultivable soil lying fallow'. Thus the natives will describe any spot or place as bayse valu, 'this particular place' ; and will oppose to odila, 'low bush', a number of terms designating other aspects of the jungle: boma or kaboma, 'sacred grove', toeyka, 'village grove', and rayboag, 'wooded coral ridge'. The words valu and odila, used contextually and in opposition, mean 'inhabited land' and 'uninhabited land' respectively. Here, as in many other expressions, opposition plays an important part in definition. The noun odila is most frequently heard in the adverbial combination 0 la odila, 'in the bush', meaning 'outside the village', 'in the wilderness'; or, in certain contexts, 'outside the garden enclosure', 'in the low, periodically cut scrub'.
