Group items tagged

Darwin's theory of language developing from love songs

Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words-stinky, fragrant, and musty-and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself. All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. The other senses don't need these linguistic workarounds. Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Yet some languages, like those of the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between 12 and 15 dedicated smell words: basic vocabulary not used for taste, or to describe general ideas of edibility. These two groups clearly show that odors, contrary to popular belief, are not universally ineffable; people from both cultures are also able to distinguish smells more accurately than Western cultures.