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Language and Smell

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kanewai
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 Message 1 of 8
04 January 2014 at 3:38am | IP Logged 
Here's some interesting science news for you.

People are bad at naming odors. In blind studies English speakers can only correctly name a smell 50% of the time. Scientists theorize that "smell representations" are not directly accessible to the language centers in the brain.

A new study suggests that this isn't true. The Jahai, a hunter-gatherer people in the Malay peninsula, have abstract words to describe smell that modern languages don't have. Psychologist Asifa Majid from Radboud University Nijmegen and linguist Niclas Burenhult from Lund University Sweden suggest that the issue is cultural and not biological.


I'm taking this information from an article in Science Daily:

Odors Expressible in Language, as Long as You Speak Right Language

excerpt wrote:
In Jahai there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell. For example, ltpɨt is used to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, bearcat, etc. Cŋɛs, another smell word, is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, etc. These terms refer to different odor qualities and are abstract, in the same way that blue and purple are abstract.

Are Jahai speakers better at naming odors? To test this Majid and Burenhult presented Jahai speakers, and a matched set of English speakers, with the same set of colors and odors to name. Each participant was simply asked to say "What color is this?" or "What odor is this?." Responses were then compared on a number of measures, including length of response, type of response and speaker agreement in names. Majid and Burenhult found that Jahai speakers could name odors with the same conciseness and level of agreement as colors, but English speakers struggled to name odors. Jahai speakers overwhelmingly used abstract Jahai smell words to describe odors, whereas English speakers used mostly source-based descriptions (like a banana) or evaluative descriptions (that's disgusting).


Their conclusions:

• People believe the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words.
• Studies to date have focused on participants from urbanized Western societies.
• We show the Jahai of the Malay Peninsula can name smells as easily as colors.
• Therefore, the proposal that people are bad at naming smells is not universally true.
• Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.

Edited by kanewai on 04 January 2014 at 3:38am

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Duke100782
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 Message 2 of 8
04 January 2014 at 6:00am | IP Logged 
Excellent insights! It reminds me of "Eskimos have X number of words for ice/snow" and "Filipino/Tagalog
has so many words for rice".

By the way how many words do the Eskimos have for ice or snow and what are they and what do they refer
to?
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druckfehler
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 Message 3 of 8
04 January 2014 at 6:24am | IP Logged 
That's definitely interesting. Not that it's completely unexpected... I understand that smell is more difficult to name for us than color and that small-words are not as high-frequency. A good reminder to use all those nice smell-words...

pungent, putrid, sweet, redolent, heady, musky, earthy, woody, tangy, smoky...

I wonder if all Jahai words for smell are exclusive to smell or can also partly be used for taste. At least to us, smell and taste very often use identical words.
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MixedUpCody
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 Message 4 of 8
04 January 2014 at 7:49am | IP Logged 
Duke100782 wrote:
By the way how many words do the Eskimos have for ice or snow and what are they and what do they refer
to?


Although there are many tribes loosely categorized under the umbrella of "Eskimo" (more properly called Inuit), the languages are typically closely related enough to be discussed together. The "50 words for snow" thing is complete and total BS. It is a myth perpetuated because people don't bother to look things up, they just hear something and then repeat it. Googleing "Eskimo snow myth" will give you several articles about this, but this article discusses some of the shoddy scholarship and journalism that led to it in the first place.

As to your question, they have basically the same amount of words for snow as any other language, which is roughly a dozen if you count lexemes like "slush", "ice" etc.

EDIT: It took me a while to find it, but this is the article we read in my Introduction to Linguistics class, and it discusses the myth very thoroughly.

Edited by MixedUpCody on 04 January 2014 at 7:57am

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Bakunin
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 Message 5 of 8
04 January 2014 at 9:14am | IP Logged 
MixedUpCody wrote:
Duke100782 wrote:
By the way how many words do the Eskimos have for ice or snow and what are they and what do they refer
to?


Although there are many tribes loosely categorized under the umbrella of "Eskimo" (more properly called Inuit), the languages are typically closely related enough to be discussed together. The "50 words for snow" thing is complete and total BS. It is a myth perpetuated because people don't bother to look things up, they just hear something and then repeat it. Googleing "Eskimo snow myth" will give you several articles about this, but this article discusses some of the shoddy scholarship and journalism that led to it in the first place.

As to your question, they have basically the same amount of words for snow as any other language, which is roughly a dozen if you count lexemes like "slush", "ice" etc.

EDIT: It took me a while to find it, but this is the article we read in my Introduction to Linguistics class, and it discusses the myth very thoroughly.


I don't doubt that English has a similar amount of words for snow as Inuit languages have. However, it seems to me that Thai (which I have some knowledge of, albeit limited) has a quite small amount of words for snow. Actually, I can't recall having ever encountered anything else than this one word for snow: หิมะ; there are of course words for ice, frost etc. the latter of which occurs occasionally on Thailand's highest mountains and is a big hit with local tourists. I've just checked the dictionary, and the suggested translations point in the same direction:
slush - หิมะหรือน้ำแข็ง ที่กำลังละลาย ("snow or ice which is melting")
sleet - แผ่นน้ำแข็งบาง ที่ปกคลุมตามพื้นหรือ ต้นไม้ ("thin icy coating on the ground or trees"), or ฝนลูกเห็บ ("rain with hail")
powder snow - can't find a translation
snow drift - one dictionary shows กองหิมะ ("snow heap" or "snow pile") which isn't exactly snow drift as far as I understand the word, others nothing

It doesn't surprise me that Thais don't have words or short expressions for stuff like slush, sleet or powder snow. It's just not part of their environment. I understand that you're angry about the subtext of the "Eskimo snow myth", and I share that sentiment, but it's a bit naive to assert that Inuit languages "have basically the same amount of words for snow as any other language, which is roughly a dozen if you count lexemes like "slush", "ice" etc.".

EDIT: typos.

Edited by Bakunin on 04 January 2014 at 9:42am

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MixedUpCody
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 Message 6 of 8
04 January 2014 at 10:02am | IP Logged 
Hey Bakunin, just so you know, it isn't my naive assertion. It is directly out of my Linguistics text book and it is
something that has come up in many ling classes. If anything, it is the assertion of professionals that study
this type of thing, which could hardly be called naive.
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Doitsujin
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 Message 7 of 8
04 January 2014 at 10:04am | IP Logged 
There's also a great 2011 book about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (Amazon link).

I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, but it's nevertheless an interesting read.
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Serpent
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 Message 8 of 8
04 January 2014 at 6:13pm | IP Logged 
I'd actually say that English is rather elaborate when it comes to the "weather words", because it's spoken in various places from India to Alaska... and of course the British folks care about discussing the range they have in a lot of detail :P Of course it's possible that some of those words are only understood in the regions where they are relevant...


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