
Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? - bootload
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-vocabulary-of-smell/414618/?single_page=true
======
darkmighty
I would hypothesize it's because smell is "Sparse". I believe we have so many
receptors with such specificity that it's less useful to think in terms of
"dense" parameters. In comparisson with other senses, for music we can locate
a sound in a pitch spectrum since we have many receptors (millions?) with
sensitivity across a single dimension (frequency). For color, we have just
three receptors, lending perceived elements to be put in a nice three
dimensional space. Now with smells, we have so many different and so specific
receptors that there's neither a canonical order for the receptors to be put
across a dimension (the case with sound) or a dense set within a few
dimensions (vision, taste). So we just associate each receptor with the most
common source.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nice analysis. I'd also add that smell is a lower-brain function. We react to
smells; we recognize smells; we have visceral responses to smells. But our
language must label smells by the indirect response we experience. So we call
them by other-sense names (sharp; hot) or by source.

~~~
shepardrtc
To add to that, I would say that we can't actually remember smells all that
well, if at all. Its a pretty big stretch to remember the smell of hamburger,
yet we can all recognize it in an instant.

Without the ability to remember something specific, its hard to effectively
define it so that others can know exactly what you mean.

~~~
hodwik
I'd argue that the memory of a smell is as visceral as the memory of a color
or sound, which is not very.

The difference is that smell is so much more powerful in reality that we see
through the memory-representation for what it is, an empty placeholder. When
we smell fresh bacon in the morning, that experience can be all-encompassing.
The same is not true for the optical experience of the thing.

With colors and sounds we are merely less aware of the qualitative emptiness
of their mental objects.

------
jerf
Well, the thought that leaps to my mind is that smell isn't like most of the
rest of the senses. Eyes and ears are so easy to quantify and abstract with
quantities that we've been doing it for decades now. Even if our eyes are not
literally CCDs and our ears are not literally microphones, they're close
enough for the quantifications to be useful. Touch and proprioception back to
a geometric shape (our body) which provides obvious spatial abstractions
(higher, lower, harder, softer, etc). Taste (considered separately from smell,
which is normally a bad idea but bear with me here) is based on a small number
of types of sensors (sweet/salt/sour/bitter/umami, if there's one or two
missing it doesn't change things much).

Smell is hundreds or thousands of distinct sensor types for various chemical
characteristics, with no _particular_ relationship to each other. We don't
have a systematic coverage of some vector space of X dimensions, we have
quasi-random point samplings that poorly populate an n-dimensional space. If
it's hard to get abstract concepts out of that, it could be because it really
is mathematically demonstrably difficult to get useful abstraction out of that
source of data. It sounds to me like even those cultures that happen to have
them are still very, very weakly covered compared to vision or sound.

~~~
kazinator
Applies to colors, beyond the basic few. That blend of red and yellow is named
after a fruit. Violet is a flower. Purple comes from the Greek word for
certain dye-producing mollusks. And when we get into the names of paint shades
or crayons, we get names like "burnt ochre" (which could be the name of a
smell too).

~~~
colanderman
Except we can describe unnamed colors relatively to nearby named colors. e.g.
"That's burnt ochre with a touch more blue." Every graphic designer and
photographer works this way when proofing prints.

This is only possible because color is the sum of only three distinct
sensations. The dimensionality of smell is likely way to high for this.

------
dimitar
The same way we describe smells by proxy (smells like a banana), Ancient
Greeks could have have used to describe objects by comparison, rather than
colors (bronze sky, sheep the color of wine and so on):
[http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/61](http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/61)

------
Kronopath
I feel like nobody who commented here actually read the article. You have
people here talking about the way smells are wired to the brain, or some
inherent property of smell itself, when the _entire article_ is about two
tribal groups that have words for smell in the same way we have words for
colour. This shows that having few words for smell is _not universal_ and is
likely not due to some hard limitation in the way smell is processed in the
brain.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Good point. But also there are those that cannot fathom how that can be, since
our own sense wouldn't/couldn't allow that ("Inconceivable!") We assume those
tribesmen must be wired differently, perhaps in an inheritable way that we
don't share.

------
jbandela1
I think the reason has a physiological basis.

The other senses go to the thalamus and then to the cortex

Vision - Lateral geniculate nucleus.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_system#Lateral_genicula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_system#Lateral_geniculate_nucleus)

Hearing - Medial geniculate nucleus.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_system#Medial_genicul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_system#Medial_geniculate_nucleus)

Taste - Ventra posteromedial nucleus.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventral_posteromedial_nucleus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventral_posteromedial_nucleus)

Touch - Ventral posterior nucleus.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventral_posterior_nucleus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventral_posterior_nucleus)

Smell on the other hand goes first to the olfactory cortex, and is not routed
through the thalamus.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_sensory_areas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_sensory_areas)

One interesting consequence is how powerful an influence smell can have on us.
The olfactory cortex is in the limbic system which is associated with emotion
and memory. This might explain why certain smells (like the smell of something
your mother used to cook) can instantly bring back memories and emotions.

------
onion2k
_In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and
musty_

I think "acrid" also applies. It's _technically_ applicable to taste as well,
but it's never used in that context. For that matter, something can taste
fragrant (eg rose lemonade).

~~~
kazinator
malodorous, noxious, reeking, stenchy, noisome, pungent.

~~~
CWuestefeld
In my mind, these correspond with a sign (good/bad) and magnitude, but leave
out the direction of the vector. For example, we frequently say that "my dog
came home reeking _OF_ [skunk, deer poop, ...]". So "reeking" is communicating
high intensity of _something_ unpleasant, and we leave it to the "of" to
specify what that strong unpleasant smell is.

------
panglott
Guy Deutscher argues that the reason that languages in industrialized
countries have developed basic color terms is due to the rise of industrial
dying and color matching technologies, and that the reason that human
languages typically don't have basic smell terms is because we don't have
things like painter's kits and color swatches for smell that would easily
allow us to compare them.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Bickerton-t.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books/review/Bickerton-t.html?_r=0)

A word's meaning is a social consensus is about a semiotic relationship, and
unless you have good means of comparing one thing to another, it's hard to
reach social consensus about the meaning.

After all, human color vision perceives a wide range, but many languages only
have basic color terms for dark, light, and red. 19th-century scientific
racism even turned this into an argument for the biological inferiority of
non-Europeans.

I love his question to his daughter: "What color is the sky?"... because the
answer is actually almost never "blue". The sky may be the thing most varied
in color in our day-to-day life. [http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-
isnt-blue/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/)

------
jtsnow
"Calvin & Hobbes" had a couple of strips that touched on this topic. Hobbes,
as a tiger, has an extensive vocabulary to describe smells.

[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/02/13](http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/02/13)
[http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/02/14](http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/02/14)

------
colanderman
I've always been curious if one could discover the approximate working
dimensionality of the nose by computing the number of principal components of
a matrix of survey results of perceived similarity between many different
smells.

Even better, if one gave names to the principal components, one can invent a
suitable lexicon for describing smells.

~~~
darkmighty
I was wondering the same. I would guess the dimension is high (maybe in the
10s or 100s?), and smells should be rarely 'similar', because I believe most
smells can be traced to a single compound or family of compounds (with shared
structure). For example, "fishy" smell seems to be associated with a singe
molecule, Trimethylamine [1].

I got a single hit from a google search:

"On the dimensionality of odor space"
[http://elifesciences.org/content/4/e07865](http://elifesciences.org/content/4/e07865)

~~~
logfromblammo
Match the smells to the molecule:

    
    
      farts          methyl mercaptan (thiol + methyl)
      durian/onion   ethyl mercaptan (thiol + ethyl)
      skunk          butyl mercaptan (thiol + butyl)
      coffee         furfuryl mercaptan (furan + 2-methanethiol)
      grapefruit     grapefruit mercaptan (cyclohexene + 1-methyl + 4R-isopropyl-2-thiol)
      lilac          alpha-terpineol (cyclohexene + 1-methyl + 4-isopropyl-2-ol)
      almond/cherry  benzaldehyde (phenyl + formyl)
      anise          anisaldehyde (phenyl + 1-formyl + 4-methoxy)
      cinnamon       cinnamadehyde (phenyl + acrolein)
      tar            cresol (phenyl + 1-hydroxy + (2 or 3 or 4)-methyl)
      smoke          guaiacol (phenyl + 1-hydroxy + 2-methoxy)
      vanilla        vanillin (phenyl + 1-hydroxy + 2-methoxy + 4-formyl)
      clove          eugenol (phenyl + 1-hydroxy + 2-methoxy + 4-allyl)
      oregano        carvacrol (phenyl + 1-hydroxy + 2-methyl + 5-isopropyl)
      thyme          thymol (phenyl + 1-hydroxy + 2-isopropyl + 5-methyl)
      mint           menthol (cyclohexanyl + 1R-hydroxy + 2S-isopropyl + 5R-methyl)
      caraway        [S+]-carvone (1-cyclohex-2-enone + 2-methyl + 5S-isopropenyl)
      spearmint      [R-]-carvone (1-cyclohex-2-enone + 2-methyl + 5R-isopropenyl)
      pine           [S-]-limonene (cyclohexene + 1-methyl + 4S-isopropenyl)
      orange         [R+]-limonene (cyclohexene + 1-methyl + 4R-isopropenyl)
      fish           trimethylamine
      cabbage/ocean  dimethyl sulfide
      butter         diacetyl + acetoin
      vomit          butyric acid
      pineapple      methyl butyrate
      orange         ethyl butyrate
      strawberry     propyl butyrate, butyl butyrate
      pear/apricot   pentyl butyrate
      glue           methyl acetate
      pear           ethyl acetate
      apple/banana   butyl acetate, amyl acetate
      vinegar        acetic acid
      goat cheese    capric acid, caprylic acids
      popcorn        6-acetyl-1,2,3,4-tetrahydro-pyridine
      coconut        gamma-nonalactone
      peach          gamma-undecalactone
      garlic         diallyl disulfide, diallyl trisulfide, diallyl tetrasulfide
    

So I'd say that olfaction primitives probably number at least in the low
hundreds. It seems as though just substituting a single functional group on an
aromatic ring or changing the length of a carbon chain can affect human
perception of the odor. Chirality usually matters. Orientation of the double
bonds usually matters. Most frustratingly, _concentration_ also matters.
Indole smells like jasmine flowers at low concentrations and like poop at
higher concentrations.

It may well be that we don't have dedicated words for smells because the IUPAC
chemical naming conventions make them unnecessary. Also, most people don't
need them. Professional aromatists would probably just say the chemical name,
or use the perfumery primitives like the plant essential oils or resins,
ambergris, civet, castoreum, hyrax, musk, and beeswax.

Esters are fruity. Linear terpenes are grassy or herby. Cyclic terpenes are
woody or flowery. Substituted aromatics are flowery or herby. Amines are
rotten or fishy. Thiols just plain stink.

Wine snobs can probably just make up whatever words they want to describe
their noses and bouquets, because their words don't really transmit meaning
most of the time, anyway.

------
whatever_dude
And here I was thinking "wait, most programming languages don't have words for
smells[1] because they are abstract concepts, not concrete features..."

Then I saw the article. Oops.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell)

------
intrasight
I think the opposite is true - we have too many words. And it's because smell
receptors are of such high dimensionality that we literally have to throw
arbitrary and verbose vocabulary against it to try and describe it. Just
listen to the wine connoisseurs describing their beverages.

~~~
LoSboccacc
Then again blind tests proved wine tasting hogwash
[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-
tas...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-
science-analysis)

------
MrQuincle
My wife has synesthesia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia))
in which every word or name comes with a taste. Admittedly, it's not exactly
the same as a smell, but it's funny how she describes a name. It's most often
indeed not a single "crisp thing", but an elaborate description. A certain
type of butter in particular state, etc. Of course I test her every year, but
it's remarkably consistent. :-)

I often like to come up with new words for concepts. One of them is the
equivalent for being blind/deaf, but then for smell. How would I describe
myself if I can't smell things?

I'm smeff?

------
reacweb
In french there are more words for wine than in inuit for snow
([http://www.auduteau.net/oenologie/vocabulaire.shtml](http://www.auduteau.net/oenologie/vocabulaire.shtml))

~~~
lgessler
The "Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow" is actually bad linguistics--for
pointers, see Mark Liberman's post on Language Log
([http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003286.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003286.html)).

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
I suspect that these "extra smells" are subjective, and that there's no
chemical basis for any of them.

When it talks about how brothers and sisters can't sit too close together
because "their smells would mingle", they could have easily substituted in the
words "auras" or "mojo", and it would have the same semantic meaning.

It's more interesting to speculate on why they would develop these subjective
values in the first place, than it is to wonder why they've confused those
values with actual odors.

------
MaysonL
Because there are so many easy ways to describe smells as similar to known
smells: like frying bacon, like unripe bananas, like ripe bananas, like
overripe bannanas, etc., etc..

------
karmakaze
Very timely. Just the other day I booted an old Mac Mini Core (not 2) Duo and
found Firefox to be very quick, wishing modern browsers didn't have to be
resource wasteful.

~~~
jld89
um... what?

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TazeTSchnitzel
Because describing smells in detail is rarely important?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Because describing smells in detail is rarely important?_

That may be tautological. Smell describes the chemical composition of air and
the substances it carries. I don't think that information is commonly trivial.
One could similarly say "we rarely talk about UV radiation because it is
unimportant."

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Maybe I could have put that better. I'm trying to say that describing the
composition of a smell is rarely important. In the typical case what matters
is either that it's the smell of some specific thing (I smell fish and chips -
that makes me hungry, I smell fire, I smell gas) or that it's pleasant (you
smell nice) or undesirable (you stink). Composition, though, mostly just
matters when describing perfume or something.

But yeah this might be a little tautological.

------
_Codemonkeyism
This stinks.

