Why can’t English speakers say what they smell?
|
Version 0 of 1. As Ludwig Wittgenstein nearly wrote: “If a dog could talk, we could not understand him.” This is because while your average dog would be discoursing happily on thousands of subtle variations of smell, we humans, with our inferior nasal apparatus, would be unable to grasp what they were talking about. And our incomprehension might be the greater if we are unfortunate enough to be English speakers, according to a study by linguist Asifa Majid. She compared the fluency and discrimination of smelltalk between speakers of the Aslian languages (found on the Malay peninsula) and Anglophones. The latter came off a poor second. “It was hard for most English speakers to identify even the common smell of cinnamon,” Majid said. The Jahai hunter-gatherers Majid studied might be better at conversationally distinguishing smells, the study speculates, because they live in a tropical rainforest, while many native English speakers inhabit the post-industrial west, where all smells must be chemically eliminated. Members of the Jahai, Majid observes, also have a dozen words for types of smell: “For example, a term pronounced ‘pl’eng’ is used for fresh blood, raw meat, mud, stagnant water, fresh fish, otters, some species of toad.” Perhaps some characteristically British smells deserve their own terms, too. For starters I humbly suggest “drick”, for the fragrance of Saturday night’s pavement puddle of chunky vomit refreshed by Sunday morning’s interminable drizzle; “nacks” for the heady combination of multiple body odours and cheap aftershave in a packed Tube train; or “prunt” for the distinctive bouquet that indicates the proximity of Nigel Farage. Yet let’s not conclude too easily, as some media reports have done, that the Jahai just have more smellwords than English. That would be to fall into an “Eskimos have more words for snow” situation – a myth that has been repeatedly debunked by linguists. For in English, there are quite a few words for general types of smell. As well as “musty”, which the study names, we have “acrid”, “putrid”, “floral”, “musky”, “pungent”, “mouldy”, “burnt”, “citrusy”, “earthy”, “gamy”, “smoky”, “woody”, and now “prunty” ... That’s more than a dozen already. So it’s important to distinguish between a claim about the average ability of English speakers to describe smells, and a claim about the resources of the language itself. Literature can be a very smelly business. Scent and stink are everywhere in Joyce, Faulkner, Orwell and particularly in Nabokov. (In Pale Fire, he writes of a flower “whose odour evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench and the house of painted wood in a distant northern land”.) Maybe citing Nabokov is cheating, since although most of his novels were written in English, his first language was Russian. Do Putin’s subjects have more sophisticated olfactory vocabulary than native Anglophones? On this point, as on so many others, more research is needed. Until then, casual inferences from a single study might be taken with a pinch of aromatic salts. |