Language and senses

Hi, Habr! I present to you the translation of the article " How your language reflects the senses you use " by Sophie Hardach.

What is easier for you to describe: the color of the grass or its smell? The answer may depend on where you come from and, in particular, on what language you have spoken since childhood.

People are often characterized as visual beings. If you are a native speaker of English, you can intuitively agree with this. After all, English has a rich vocabulary for flowers and geometric shapes, but few words for smells. Nevertheless, a recent global study shows that it varies from culture to culture, whether we perceive the world mainly by watching, listening, sniffing, tasting or feeling. And this preference is reflected in our language.
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Frame from the movie "Arrival"

The study was based on tests conducted by 26 researchers in 20 languages ​​in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia, in different places - from large modern cities to remote indigenous villages. Participants were asked to describe so-called sensory stimulants, such as colored paper, a sip of sugar water, or the smell of a flavored card.

The results show that our way of life, our environment and even the shape of our houses can influence how we perceive things, and how easily (or not) we can express this perception in words.

“I think that we often think of language as a means of transmitting information about the world,” said Asifa Majid, a professor of language, communication and cultural knowledge at York University, who led the study. "You can see it in how we think about feelings and how it is reflected in modern science."

Madzhid says that, for example, many textbooks call people visual beings.

“The rationale for this was a greater number of brain areas responsible for visual perception than for smell. But another important evidence is language. So, people often say, well, there are just more words to talk about the things that we see, so it’s difficult for us to talk about smells, ”she says.

However, Majeed claims that some societies are more focused on smell or sound. In her own research into the hunter-gatherer community in the Malay Jahai Peninsula (Jahai), Majeed created a smelling vocabulary that is as varied and accurate as the English color dictionary.

The study involved specialists in languages ​​as diverse as Umpila, which is spoken by only about 100 people in Australia, and English, which is spoken by about a billion people around the world. A total of 313 people were tested. The researchers gave them different stimulants, and then measured the level of "coding" of each group, that is, the level of agreement between the answers in each group. A high level of coding means that a group has a consistent way to talk about, say, certain colors. A low level of encryption may indicate that the group does not have a common, common dictionary for these colors, or that it cannot identify them.

Native speakers of English spoke the best about shapes and colors. They all agreed, for example, that something was a triangle or green.

Lao and Farsi speakers, on the other hand, succeeded in naming tastes. When offering water with a bitter taste, all Farsi speakers in the study described it as “talkh,” which means “bitter” in Farsi.

With native English speakers, the situation is different. When they are offered the same water with a bitter taste, “English speakers describe its taste from bitter to salty, sour, decent, ordinary, mint, like ear wax, medicine, and so on,” says Majid. She also claims that this kind of confusion with taste constantly happens to native English speakers in laboratory tests: “They describe bitter as salty and sour, they describe sour as bitter, they describe salt as sour. So, although we have a vocabulary, there seems to be some confusion in the minds of people about how to transfer their taste sensations to the language. ”

Interestingly, the linguistic communities that had very high scores for the tasting task — Farsi, Laotian, and Cantonese — all have a classically sophisticated cuisine that cultivates a wide range of tastes, including bitterness.

Other participants struggled with certain tasks, because their language simply did not have enough words for what they were shown. Umpila (Umpila), the language spoken by the hunter-gatherer community in Australia, has only words for black, white and red. However, it was easier for the speakers of Umpil to describe the smells. This tendency to smell, and not to sight, is found among hunter-gatherers around the world, including the aforementioned Jahai. The reason may be associated with life and hunting in the forests, rich in smells.

For those of us who spend more time in front of screens than among fragrant plants, research can be an incentive for finding new sensory sensations. But it is also a reminder of the value of linguistic diversity. Umpila, for example, is endangered. The number of native speakers of Umpil is reduced. And yet, when it comes to describing smells, this rare endangered language obviously has an advantage over fast-developing English.