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Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?

posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:31AM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @09:49AM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday November 13 2015, @09:49AM (#262571) Homepage
    Strike out yellow (shining), purple (colour of a particular shellfish), and white (light) from your list immediately. I've not checked the etymologies of the others, I'm sure most will fall.
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  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday November 13 2015, @10:25AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Friday November 13 2015, @10:25AM (#262575) Journal
    Etymology isn't the point. We're talking about the primary meaning of these words to us, today. These words all have the primary meaning in modern English of the abstract idea of the color. Nobody uses the word purple to talk about the shellfish from which Tyrian purple dye was derived in ancient times (that's called a spiny dye murex in modern English). You can't point to an object and say it's a purple or a white or a yellow the way you could point to an orange or a violet.
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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @12:37PM

      by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Friday November 13 2015, @12:37PM (#262607) Homepage
      It being in the etymology but not the current meaning simply means we forgot that earlier association its cognates had as the language and the world evolved. We called things that because our elders called things that, and that's all the reason we know. But if you ask your elders' elders' elders (repeated 50 times), they'd tell you the shiny metal was shiny coloured the way that metal is.

      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.
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    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 13 2015, @04:24PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 13 2015, @04:24PM (#262720) Journal

      We're talking about the primary meaning of these words to us, today.

      No, we weren't. You were.