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Describe a banana. It's yellow, perhaps with some green edges. When peeled, it has a smooth, soft, mushy texture. It tastes sweet, maybe a little creamy.
And it smells like... well, it smells like a banana.
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.
...
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." Kant wrote that "Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense." Indeed, when Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer can unerringly identify smells, remember them, and mix and match them in his head, he seems disconcerting and supernatural to us, precisely because we suck so badly at those tasks.
Hunter-gatherer groups appear to have many more words for smell.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Friday November 13 2015, @02:21AM
That's kind of a BS distinction... What's a dedicated color word? Red as in red-handed? Green as in greenhorn or green energy? Blue as in sad? Yellow as in Marty McFly? What's wrong with words like pungent, putrid, rancid, doggy, odorless, lemony, lilac, lime, mildewed, minty, moldy, piney, plastic, rose, skunky, woodsy, new car, earthy, fishy, rotten, sweet, funky, citrusy, damp, dank, flowery, yeasty? A lot of them are used primarily for describing smells.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @02:30AM
Most of those words are reference to things that smell alike.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @03:06AM
And what is left are measures of smell magnitude or other subjectivity thus yielding no information about the smell itself but only information about what an observer feels about that smell.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday November 13 2015, @03:17AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @03:27AM
There are square, edgy, round, bright, dim, sharp, scratchy, smooth, etc., etc., - so many other options for other sensory perceptions, unlike smell.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Friday November 13 2015, @02:37AM
Agreed. The omission of pungent is the most glaring since it's not any less common than musty and it's clearly a purely smell related word.
I could just as easily say that there are only four dedicated taste words: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. There are other words that mean sweet, but none that clearly define different types of sweetness. Umami is a neologism (even in Japanese) and translating it as "savory" is a redefinition of a vague concept with some overlap with a glutamate-based taste.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Friday November 13 2015, @06:59AM
Don't forget feculent.
The naming of smells is language dependent, and this study seemingly focuses on english.
This was covered in ScienceMag last year. [sciencemag.org]
To find out if the Jahai are better at naming smells than the rest of us, Majid and colleagues asked native Jahai speakers and native English speakers to describe 12 different odors: cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, smoke, chocolate, rose, paint thinner, banana, pineapple, gasoline, soap, and onion. The Jahai easily and consistently named the odors, whereas English speakers struggled, the team reports in the February issue of Cognition.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Friday November 13 2015, @11:49AM
As are acrid, dank, foul, etc. There are plenty of non-comparison smell words.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Friday November 13 2015, @03:26AM
Words like red are dedicated colour words because they mean primarily those colours. The expression 'red-handed' came about from the image of a guilty person whose hands are stained with blood, which is, of course, red. Greenhorn came about because new leaves are a deep shade of green, and the term compares new people to these newly-sprouted leaves. Green energy is of course environmentally friendly energy, which is of course associated in the modern mind with green, growing things. Yellow as in Marty McFly comes about because yellow is the colour of yellow bile, one of the four humours of medieval medicine, which was associated with cowardice (though this etymology is up for debate). Blue as in sad is also similarly derived from mediaeval humoristic medicine, as it was the colour of the blue-black bile (the 'melan cholia' from which derives the modern word melancholy) that medieval physicians believed an excess of made people sad. But the point I think is made: these other meanings of the colour words are secondary and ultimately derive from the colour itself and the associations people have made with those colours.
In contrast, most of the smell words you mention, with the sole exception of pungent I think, describe smells by reference to some other thing that they smell like. If our vocabulary for colours were like our vocabulary for smells, we might instead describe something red as bloody or apple-coloured, something green as leafy or grassy, something blue as sky-like, and so on.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 13 2015, @04:35AM
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday November 13 2015, @04:53AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday November 13 2015, @05:38AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Friday November 13 2015, @05:55AM
We say blood is red. We say cherries are red. We use the word 'red' to denote the abstract idea of the colour that is shared by both blood and cherries. We're delving into some pretty deep problems of linguistic philosophy here, it's a complex topic that has tied up philosophers for thousands of years, probably at least since the days of Aristotle and Plato. Here's an idea of the kind of philosophy this is getting into:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate [wikipedia.org]
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @09:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday November 13 2015, @10:25AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @12:37PM
Compare the floppy icon for saving files in modern programs. That icon still represents a storage medium even if the kids today have never seen a floppy. It's not magically become abstract simply because the object's not in current use. Or the symbol used for a train station on a map shaped like no vehicle from the last 50 years. That still represents a steam engine even if no-ones seen a steam engine.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 13 2015, @04:24PM
We're talking about the primary meaning of these words to us, today.
No, we weren't. You were.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @06:34AM
臭い! You Henna Gaijin, you! All your BO now belong to us, unfortunately!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @09:59AM
> doggy
smelling like a dog - did you read TFS?
> lemony
smelling like a lemon - did you read TFS?
> lilac
smelling like a lilac - did you read TFS?
> mildewed
smelling like mildew - did you read TFS?
> minty
smelling like mint - did you read TFS?
> moldy
smelling like mold - did you read TFS?
> piney
smelling like pine - did you read TFS?
> plastic
smelling like plastic - did you read TFS?
> rose
smelling like a rose - did you read TFS?
> skunky
OH FOR FUCKS SAKE! Almost every single one of your words is not a counter-example to the claim. Pungent, you can have. Putrid and rancid are borderline, but I'd say they were comparison with the smell of rotting stuff.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by oldmac31310 on Friday November 13 2015, @10:15PM
You're right. This is a bullshit article. How about 'acrid', 'cloying', 'sickly sweet', 'mouldy', 'fetid', 'fruity', etc.