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Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?

posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:31AM   
from the that's-non-scents dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Evidence in action! Evidence in action! (Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Friday November 13 2015, @02:47AM

  by Zz9zZ (1348) on Friday November 13 2015, @02:47AM (#262472)

  Pretty much all the posts so far have tried to explain away the findings, rationalize and explain why there is a lack. Some good points, I was going to make the smell/taste connection as well.

  I guess it just demonstrates our lingual deficiency, how we have a hard time even discussing the topic. I would like to highlight the last sentence of the summary: "Hunter-gatherer groups appear to have many more words for smell." Similar to how the Inuit have a crazy number of words for types of snow.

  Its not that there is some inherent difficulty with human smell and linguistics, its just that we don't care!

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• Re:Evidence in action! (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @10:39AM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday November 13 2015, @10:39AM (#262581) Homepage

  Yeah, that final sentence stuck out a bit for me too, subtly screaming "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis". Those unfamiliar with the SWH can simply substitute the word "hogwash" (and perhaps prefix it with "anecdotal" if they wish to cover their backs). There's nothing hunter-gathery or non-hunter-gathery about using real-world object comparisons to describe smells. Comparisons are not inferior, nor superior, to abstract terms in their usefulness to either side of that divide.

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