2 Knowing, Smelling and Telling Tales in Luwo

Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology

“…Smell vocabularies have previously been considered a characteristic of small languages with few speakers [51] (of the existing 6500 languages, the median number of speakers is less than 1000) and particularly likely to appear in hunter-gatherer languages [59,60]. Numerous hunter-gatherer languages have indeed been reported with smell vocabularies [8,12,41,43,[59][60][61][62], but sizeable smell lexicons have also been reported in various pastoral and horticultural communities [37,42,61,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72] as well as in major languages of industrialized societies with millions of speakers [51,73]. It could be that smell lexicons are more likely to appear in small languages or hunter-gatherer contexts, but it is premature to conclude so.…”

“…investigation has revealed more. For example, smell is used metaphorically to refer to knowledge in Luwo (Sudan) [70] and is used to describe the relationship between words as part of an avoidance register in Datooga (Tanzania) [79]. Seri (a hunter-gatherer language of Mexico) has an elaborate smell lexicon and a number of specific olfactory metaphors for emotions (e.g., being angry), dreams (e.g., having a nightmare), ingestion (e.g., detesting food), activities (e.g., doing something carelessly), relationships (e.g., leaving someone without family), and the weather (e.g., being bad weather) [80].…”

Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction

“…Second, this is found not only for sight verbs, but also for hearing and multi-sense verbs in certain languages, and even to some degree for verbs of touch, taste and smell. This highlights the need for further in-depth language-specific study of the lexical associations and cultural conceptions of the "lower senses" of touch, taste and smell (see, e.g., Backhouse 1994;Burenhult and Majid 2011;Storch 2013). Third, the fact that vision verbs and (non-visual) multi-sense verbs share several semantic and pragmatic associations supports the treatment of perception as a unified domain for extension.…”